Kenneth Roth’s Righting Wrongs: Documenting a life spent on the frontline’s of human rights advocacy

Kenneth Roth has never been shy. As an undergraduate at Brown University and later at Yale Law School, he was known for his sharp intellect, courage, and relentless curiosity. 

His early legal career - four years in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, one of the country’s most prominent federal prosecutor’s offices - laid the foundation for a life dedicated to justice and, ultimately, to reshaping the global human rights movement.

For thirty years as the head of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Roth became one of the world’s most formidable advocates for the voiceless. 

Unlike many of his peers in government or at the United Nations, Roth feared no one. 

He would walk into the offices of secretary-generals, prime ministers, and presidents and hold them to account on their obligations under international law. 

He famously called one meek and ineffective UN High Commissioner for Human Rights “timid", a bluntness that reflected his refusal to tolerate inaction in the face of abuse.

Roth didn’t just “name and shame” abusive regimes; he also challenged colleagues who hesitated to confront power. 

Always measured - never shrill - he rooted his arguments in the law, lending weight and clarity to his words and making him one of the most influential voices on global human rights. 

He rightly earned the nickname “the Godfather of Human Rights”. 

When Roth stepped down from HRW after building it into an organisation with the influence and reach of a small state, he did not pause. 

Instead, he wrote Righting Wrongs a sweeping debut memoir that is, in many ways, his magnum opus. 

The book chronicles the strategies and battles that defined his tenure, but it is also a meditation on persistence and how to keep fighting for justice in an era of impunity. 

Roth never appears to grow depressed or despondent: he just keeps going with the energy of a long-distance runner. 

Roth takes readers through some of the most pivotal moments of modern history: The post-Kuwait invasion period under Saddam Hussein; the genocide in Rwanda; the wars in Gaza and Syria; and ongoing crises in Ukraine, China, Russia, and Israel. 

He spares no one, offering candid assessments of successive US administrations, from Reagan to Trump to Biden, for their failures to fully uphold human rights principles.

‘Relentless drive’

The chapters on Syria are particularly searing. Over thirteen years of war, nearly 600,000 people were killed and millions displaced. 

Beginning in 2012, Roth and his team documented many atrocities, focusing on the cruel deliberate bombings of hospitals and the targeting of doctors. 

His wife, Dr Annie Sparrow, a brilliant and equally committed human rights expert - in her case, a pediatrician - sometimes worked alongside him to highlight the weaponisation of healthcare in war zones.  

Roth and his team raised international outrage, eventually pressuring Turkey, France, and Germany to confront Vladimir Putin and halt the indiscriminate bombings in Idlib. 

American human rights activist Kenneth Roth said Netanyahu is emboldened by ongoing US military aid, he linked attacks on international justice institutions to efforts to evade accountability and suggested Trump could be legally liable for aiding genocide and war crimes pic.twitter.com/bBALb7l8lh

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) July 25, 2025

In March 2020, the bombings stopped. “Sometimes the most you can say is: ‘We prevented things from getting worse.’ Sometimes you can say, ‘we made it better for a while,’” Roth reflects. 

“That’s just what the defence of human rights is. You just need to keep pushing.”

This relentless drive extended beyond advocacy and documentation. Roth’s strategic approach to fundraising transformed HRW from a modest NGO into a global powerhouse.

Taking over in his thirties, in the shadow of founder Aryeh Neier - the legendary civil libertarian who defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in a suburb of Chicago - Roth embraced the challenge of building the organisation’s reach.

Unlike many executive directors, he actually enjoyed fundraising, seeing it as a way to engage people directly in the cause. Travelling economy class, he traipsed across the globe.

At the heart of Righting Wrongs is Roth’s belief in the long, difficult arc of justice. 

In 2010, he secured a historic $100 million, ten-year challenge grant from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, allowing HRW to expand its global footprint dramatically.

At the heart of Righting Wrongs is Roth’s belief in the long, difficult arc of justice. 

For those of us working in accountability, that belief is essential; without it, the daily grind of confronting atrocities would feel impossible. 

Roth, however, is clear-eyed: progress does not happen on its own. 

“The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice - but it’s long, and you need to be persistent,” he told students at the University of Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs in 2025.   

He once was more pointed in an interview: “The defence of rights is a relentless struggle. Governments are always tempted to violate human rights. The task of the human rights movement is to change the cost-benefit analysis of repression.”

Righting Wrongs is more than a memoir; it is both a history of modern human rights battles and a practical guide to advocacy. 

Roth writes with the same precision that defined his leadership: unsparing but not cynical, deeply informed yet accessible. 

For anyone working in the field - or for those simply trying to understand how power can be challenged - this book is required reading.

Janine di Giovanni is the Executive Director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit, and a Senior Fellow in Human Rights at Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.  She is the author of eight books, and has investigated war crimes in 18 wars in a 35-year career. 

Righting Wrongs is published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin