Righting Wrongs
Righting Wrongs
Three Decades on the Front Lines
Battling Abusive Governments
Kenneth Roth
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To Annie
Preface ix
1. Idlib, Syria 3
2. Formative Years 11
3. Pressure for Change 20
4. Leading and Building an Organization 72
5. China 101
6. Russia and Syria 129
7. Saudi Arabia 156
8. War Crimes 172
9. Israel 187
10. The United Nations 213
11. Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo 229
12. Hungary and Poland 243
13. The United States 252
14. International Criminal Justice 276
15. Reflections and the Challenges Ahead 319
Acknowledgments 327
Notes 329
Index 417
Preface
In countries with the rule of law, most people look to the courts to enforce human rights. But in many countries, judges have been corrupted, compromised, or killed, and are therefore unable to stop the government from violating rights.
Human Rights Watch, which I directed for three decades, figured out how to deploy the public’s sense of right and wrong to pressure the political branches of governments to respect rights. The process is not ideal—a strong, independent judiciary is often better—but it can be remarkably effective. This book pulls back the curtain to show the strategies that we used, both what worked and what did not.
People, of course, want human rights, at least for themselves, but governments that are intent on retaining power by suppressing political opposition often resist. The result is a struggle, one in which the never-ending duty of the human-rights movement—of people who care about rights—is to increase the price of oppression, to shift a government’s cost-benefit calculation so that abuse no longer seems as desirable. Much can be done, but the process is rarely linear.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” yet there is no guarantee of respect for rights. Indeed, in a less remembered part of the same speech, Dr. King admitted as much: “[H]uman progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals.”
As I show, it is entirely possible for a relatively small group of
people—Human Rights Watch and our allies—to succeed in curbing or mitigating abuse. But even when the pressure falls short, it is still often felt, helping to prevent further deterioration. Almost always, a price can be imposed for misconduct in order to discourage officials from behaving badly, though the route may not at first be obvious. My colleagues and I constantly had to analyze where our points of leverage might be. We found that the combination of creativity and perseverance regularly yielded productive paths to right the wrong.
There are plenty of human-rights challenges today: the autocratic threat to democracy, pervasive war crimes in many armed conflicts, the rise of some governments that attack human-rights fundamentals, as well as climate change, poverty, inequality, and the risks of artificial intelligence. But this is no time for despair. These challenges underscore the urgency of the tasks before us. Tellingly, governments went to great lengths to avoid the pressure we brought to bear, which speaks to its power.
I am writing this book because I have found that when people understand the tactics we used to push back against abusive governments, they are encouraged to join the effort. Some people support human rights in the abstract but doubt that much can be done to guarantee them. They think of human-rights activists as well intentioned but ineffectual. I was determined to build an organization that would not settle for gestures but sought concrete results. Demystifying this work—illustrating what we did to change government policy, not simply by standing for rights but by exerting pressure to uphold them—helps people to move from perfunctory support to active engagement. Knowing that real change is possible, that the perennial skeptics are wrong, encourages people to help make that change happen.
The strategies I describe are hardly the only ways to defend human rights. As an international human-rights organization, Human Rights Watch had options and priorities that might differ from those of a local or national rights group. But these strategies worked for us.
The pressure techniques I outline, while used to defend human rights, can be deployed in other fields as well. As I show, the key to changing the conduct of governments is pushing them to live
up to widely shared moral standards. That strategy can work wherever the conduct of individuals or institutions falls short of public expectations—in academia, health care, business, anyplace where norms of behavior exist or can be promoted.
Many progressives develop expertise and propose good ideas but put too little effort into pushing the target government or institution to make the change they seek. Good ideas alone are rarely enough to overcome the comfort of inertia; generating pressure on a target is usually needed to tilt the balance in their favor. That requires understanding how to exert pressure and figuring out where it can be applied most effectively.
As I describe the many battles that my colleagues and I fought, drawing on my own recollections and notes as well as those of my colleagues, this book can be seen as a handbook for action. In outlining our experience addressing many of the world’s most difficult countries and pressing issues, my point is less to prescribe particular strategies than to stimulate thought and discussion about ones that might be pursued. There are rarely simple answers, and regular reassessment is required. The examples I cite show approaches that can work, but there is ample room for disagreement, as there was within Human Rights Watch. Debate is healthy. It produces a stronger movement.
Governments might seem large and immutable, but only a few people are needed to expose their misconduct and to generate pressure for reform. Information, carefully collected and strategically deployed, can be powerful. As Margaret Mead reportedly said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Using the strategies that I detail, Human Rights Watch demonstrated the truth of her observation. I am proud of and eager to share the tools and techniques that we developed to make the world a better place.
Righting Wrongs
Idlib, Syria
Ithink it’s important to start by saying that even in the most dire situations, it is possible to make a difference. And when the stakes are life and death, even a small difference can be tremendously important. One of the biggest challenges we faced during my time at Human Rights Watch was trying to stop the slaughter of civilians in Syria. The enormity of the problem required initiative and persistence to build enough pressure to have an impact.
After brutal repression of peaceful anti-government protests in early 2011 yielded an armed conflict, Syria became synonymous with mass atrocities. The carnage was so awful that it was a central focus of Human Rights Watch and a personal preoccupation for me. Despite the magnitude of the challenge, we helped to curtail this unspeakable cruelty.
Throughout the fighting, the Syrian government ripped up the rule book—international humanitarian law—that is designed to spare civilians the hazards of war. Instead, it targeted civilians. It dropped barrel bombs on them (oil drums filled with explosives and shrapnel to maximize damage), deployed chemical weapons against them, starved them, and forcibly disappeared, tortured, and executed them. It was an appalling, deliberate effort to defeat an insurgency by using war crimes and atrocities.
To better understand the horrors unfolding, I periodically visited Gaziantep, the Turkish city known as a sister of Syria’s Aleppo. During my visits, Gaziantep was the hub for humanitarian opera-
tions in rebel-held northwestern Syria. I spoke with refugee families, orphans, humanitarian workers, and especially doctors, who were impressively trying to provide health care in very dangerous circumstances. I became deeply concerned about their plight and the fate of the people they were trying to serve.
The doctors vividly described the dreadful conditions of life under the Syrian government. One anesthesiologist who had been serving in the military told me of having been forced to sedate sixty-three people in detention when the United Nations–Arab League special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, visited Idlib in 2012. The purpose was to silence them and make it easier to hide from Brahimi their shackles and wounds from torture and medical neglect. He found the experience so unbearable that he fled to opposition territory. An internist with whom I stayed in Gaziantep described working late at night after his regular job in Aleppo to see patients in secret clinics, who feared arrest if they appeared at a government-run facility. He also fled. Three of his students were arrested and killed for having worked with him. I couldn’t help but be appalled by these stories and determined to do my part to try to ease this suffering.
Even though international humanitarian law protected the hospitals in opposition areas where these doctors worked, they were a favorite target of Syrian forces and their Russian allies. One vascular surgeon described desperately trying to stop the bleeding of patients after their hospital had been bombed. The doctors moved some hospitals underground to hide and protect them, but those, too, were attacked. When the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) persuaded reluctant doctors and humanitarian organizations to provide the coordinates of their hidden hospitals, naively hoping that it might deter the attacks, the Syrian and Russian militaries targeted them more precisely. Nearly one thousand medical workers—doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers—were killed.
Despite the support of troops sent by Iran and its allied Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, the government of Syrian president Bashar alAssad had lost large swaths of the country to rebel forces and was stuck in a military stalemate. That changed in September 2015, when President Vladimir Putin sent the Russian military. Government forces gradually retook much of the country, including the rebel-held
enclaves of eastern Aleppo in 2016 and Eastern Ghouta in 2018. Alas, the Russian military only intensified Assad’s war-crime strategy.
Syria’s Idlib province, in the northwestern part of the country, and a few surrounding bits of territory became the last area still controlled by armed forces opposing the government. By 2020, three million civilians lived in Idlib, roughly half having been forcibly displaced from elsewhere in Syria. Many of the displaced had lived in areas under siege by the Syrian army. When these areas fell, they were given the choice of living under Assad’s ruthless rule or boarding his notorious green buses to be shipped to Idlib. Many chose Idlib. At least one million civilians were crowded into camps, described as “sites of last resort,” along the border with Turkey. As the number of Syrian refugees in Turkey mounted toward 3.5 million, the Turkish government gradually closed its border.
The civilians in Idlib were subject to regular bombardment by Syrian and Russian planes and helicopters. Those bombers deliberately targeted schools, markets, and apartment buildings, as well as hospitals, as Human Rights Watch’s investigation and reporting showed. Pursuing the classic, if criminal, counterinsurgency strategy of draining the sea to catch the fish, the attackers’ aim was to chase civilians from Idlib to make it easier for Syrian troops to recapture the territory from the rebel forces living among them.
During one of my visits to Gaziantep, a Syrian doctor from a hospital in Idlib told me, referring to the United Nations secretarygeneral through the end of 2016, “We’re tired of always hearing Ban Ki-moon say that he is ‘concerned’ or ‘shocked’ ” by the bombing of civilians in Syria. I fully understood his frustration, but the fault hardly lay with Ban. Russia’s and China’s vetoes had paralyzed the UN Security Council, and no nation offered much beyond occasional expressions of outrage.
Human Rights Watch began as we always did—we investigated, documented, and reported on these war crimes. The first point of such reporting is to shame the perpetrators. Because most governments claim to uphold human rights, we can tarnish their reputations—and generate pressure for change—by spotlighting their abusive conduct.
The difficulty in the case of Syria was that Assad, already willing to do whatever it took to cling to power in what he saw as a life-and-
death struggle, had little reputation left to lose. He sometimes tried to cover up his atrocities, but they were often meticulously recorded and publicized—by opposition Syrian videographers who posted their work on YouTube, a commission of inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council (the world’s top multilateral body on human rights), as well as Human Rights Watch and allied organizations. Showing that he was bombing civilians in Idlib, as he had bombed civilians in many other parts of Syria, was not going to be enough to end his war crimes.
Putin was another story. Now that Putin has committed similar atrocities in Ukraine to avoid risking a defeat that would jeopardize his rule, he has moved closer to Assad’s realm of shamelessness. But at the time, Putin tried to maintain an aura of respectability. He did not want to be seen as a war criminal. That gave us leverage, as I outlined in July 2018 in an article in the New York Review of Books. Knowing that the Syrian military needed Russian support and that the Russian government was susceptible to pressure, we decided to focus on Putin.
We knew that shameful publicity alone would not be enough. We would need to combine it, as we so often did, with pressure from sympathetic governments. We focused on Germany and France, as the two most important members of the European Union, and Turkey, because of its significant interest in northern Syria and its respectful relations with Russia. I also spoke with an official from Iran, a key political and military ally of Assad. Behind each of these efforts were years of outreach and relationship building.
Turkey was a difficult interlocutor because Human Rights Watch regularly reported on and criticized the increasingly autocratic rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. We had also reported for years on the violent abuses of his predecessors. Yet some officials maintained a degree of independence and were receptive to speaking with Human Rights Watch and hearing us out on Syria.
We had numerous sober, businesslike meetings over the years with senior Turkish officials. Sometimes the meetings paralleled my visits to Gaziantep, which reinforced for me the enormous stakes. I was often accompanied by Emma Sinclair-Webb, Human Rights Watch’s researcher for Turkey—a Brit who spoke beautiful Turkish and knew the country extraordinarily well. One deputy prime min-
ister took copious notes as we spoke in Ankara in January 2016, as if he did not want to forget a single word. The same month, I met with Turkey’s then prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, after a latenight dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In September 2018, Emma and I saw the deputy foreign minister in Ankara. In October 2019, I held a long and remarkably candid conversation with a senior Turkish security official at a Munich Security Conference meeting in Doha, Qatar.
After the flight of more than one million refugees to Europe in 2015, most crossing by raft or small boat from Turkey to nearby Greek islands, the European Union paid the Turkish government 6 billion euros to stop further refugees from leaving. Turkish officials told me that if the loss of civilian life in Syria became too high, it would again allow Syrians to flee, but that was not the same as stopping the slaughter.
In Ankara in September 2018, I met with a large group of Western ambassadors over dinner at the Norwegian ambassador’s residence, urging them to convey to their contacts in the Turkish government my concerns about the need to protect civilians in Idlib. I was encouraged by their interest but appalled at their lack of any apparent strategy. I outlined how pressure on Putin could make a difference.
I pursued talks with the Iranian government because it was a key military backer of Assad. It also used Syrian territory to resupply Hezbollah, its ally against Israel in southern Lebanon. Both Hezbollah troops and Shia militia organized by the Iranian government provided important on-the-ground support to Syrian government troops throughout the armed conflict. I worried that they might contribute to a bloodbath in Idlib.
At the time, I met periodically with Iran’s then foreign minister, Javad Zarif. He had studied in the United States, spoke perfect colloquial English, and was open to meeting with human-rights groups. I routinely joined representatives from several colleague organizations such as Amnesty International, the International Crisis Group, and Crisis Action to speak with him on the sidelines of various international gatherings—the Munich Security Conference, the World Economic Forum, and the United Nations General Assembly. He was always an honest interlocutor with me. I was surprised in Davos in January 2014 when he turned to me and said, “I teach human
rights. And I tell my students that it’s a mistake to think that Human Rights Watch reports only on Iran. It also reports on Guantánamo and Israel.” In February 2019 at the Munich Security Conference, we discussed Idlib. He assured me that, because of the threat to civilian life, Iranian forces would not take part in any offensive there. He also said that he had just visited Lebanon to meet with the leader of Hezbollah, and it would not take part either.
As I said, a key part of our strategy was to enlist European Union leaders to pressure Putin. German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron were the two most influential, and I met periodically with both. Human Rights Watch maintained offices in Berlin and Paris, where the primary job of our “advocacy” staff was to influence German and French foreign policy on human rights. (We maintained offices in other key capitals as well.) Most of their work was done with other officials, but on occasion I was called in to meet the chancellor or the president. When possible, I was joined by Wenzel Michalski, then our Berlin-based Germany director, or Bénédicte Jeannerod, our Paris-based France director. Merkel and Macron were the sort of leaders with whom I enjoyed meeting. They both led powerful countries whose intervention on human rights mattered. Both expressed sympathy, although I knew their other national interests would often take priority over human rights. Both had the self-confidence to engage in a frank and open conversation—not a set-piece talking-point exchange that accomplishes little.
In an early October 2018 meeting at Merkel’s office in the modern German Chancellery in Berlin, I asked her to intervene personally with Putin. I spoke of the horrible humanitarian toll of the Syrian and Russian attacks on civilians in Idlib and explained the potential for another refugee crisis in Europe should the killing become so severe that Turkey would be forced to reopen its borders with Syria. I stressed that she and Macron had leverage over Putin because he valued his relations with them.
In September 2018, Bénédicte and I made similar points with a senior French Foreign Ministry official, and Bénédicte repeated them later that month in a meeting with Macron and then foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. The German and French governments obviously knew what was happening in Idlib; our job was to move
the problem higher on their agenda for action. We continued to press the point in direct meetings with government officials and in the media.
Slowly, the pressure on Putin increased, although as so often happens, the process was not linear. In September 2018, Erdogan warned in a meeting with Putin and Iran’s then president, Hassan Rouhani, that an all-out assault on Idlib would result in a “bloodbath,” yet Putin refused to agree to a ceasefire. However, a few days later, in a meeting with Erdogan, Putin did agree at least to create a demilitarized buffer zone between opposing forces in Idlib.
In October 2018, several weeks after my meeting with Merkel, she, Macron, and Erdogan met with Putin. Macron, supported by Merkel and Erdogan, pressed the Russian government to exercise “very clear pressure” on Damascus for a “stable and lasting ceasefire in Idlib.” But even the buffer-zone agreement was never fully implemented, and by May 2019, Syrian and Russian forces were bombing civilians intensively.
On February 20, 2020, while at a European Union summit in Brussels, Merkel and Macron called Putin to press him to stop bombing civilians and civilian structures in Idlib. A few days later, what was said to be a Syrian airstrike killed at least thirty-six Turkish soldiers in northwestern Syria. The Turkish military quickly targeted Syrian troops in retaliation. That reminded Putin and Assad that Turkey was a potent military force willing to act if things got out of hand.
The combined pressure finally worked. On March 5, 2020, after six hours of negotiations in Moscow, Erdogan and Putin agreed to a ceasefire. That largely stopped major attacks on civilians in Idlib. Only in 2023 did that begin somewhat to break down, especially after an October drone attack on a Syrian military graduation ceremony by unknown assailants killed at least eighty. The attacks came to a definitive end with the sudden fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. For at least three years before then, if not longer, millions of people in Idlib were able to carry on their lives without constant fear of sudden death from the skies.
As Idlib illustrates, most human-rights work is incremental, progress sporadic. Violations of human rights wax and wane. Persistent pressure is often needed to sustain progress. Moreover, when prog-
ress occurs, Human Rights Watch can rarely take credit alone. Local human-rights defenders, sympathetic journalists, well-intentioned officials, and engaged members of the public are valued allies. The defense of human rights is a team effort.
That defense also requires humility. It is not an endeavor of easy or permanent victories. But modesty is not the same as resignation or indifference. Mitigating human-rights violations may not sound as dramatic as ending them definitively, but it can make an enormous difference for the people affected. That is what kept me going during my three decades leading Human Rights Watch.
Formative Years
Igrew up in Deerfield, Illinois, a comfortable middle-class suburb of Chicago. My father had fled Nazi Germany as a twelveyear-old boy. He did not dwell on the past, but when my three siblings and I asked questions, he talked about it.
At first the stories were funny—about the fast, mischievous horse that delivered meat for my grandfather’s butcher shop in Frankfurt. As we children became older, the stories became more serious— about life as a young Jewish boy living under the Nazis—and they made us aware of the evil that governments can do. My father was forced from his neighborhood school to a Jewish one. He worried about being punished on some pretext such as riding his bicycle on the sidewalk, but more seriously about my grandfather being arrested.
The Nazis insisted that Jews turn in any weapons they possessed. My grandfather had served in the German army in the frontline trenches during World War I, and as apparently was the tradition, he took his rifle home with him when he finished his service. This presented a dilemma: he feared arrest if he kept the rifle and it was discovered, but he also feared it could be used as a reason to arrest him if he turned it in. So my grandfather broke the rifle down into its parts and put them into his jacket pocket. He took my father and his brother to a nearby park, and as the boys skipped stones into a pond, my grandfather pretended to join them but skipped rifle pieces, disposing of his dilemma.
My grandfather, who grew up in a tiny village outside of Frank-
furt, had only a sixth-grade education but was plenty intelligent. He knew upon Hitler’s seizing power in 1933 that he would need to get the family out of Germany. The government was still letting Jews leave; the problem was finding a government that would accept them. The biggest obstacle was financial. The U.S. government reluctantly allowed some Jews to enter, but they needed to show that they would not become wards of the state. That was not easy for my family, because they were living hand to mouth. They were thus forced to move to New York in stages: first, a great uncle, who was able to enter because he had lived there briefly before; then, my grandfather and aunt; and a long nine months later, after my grandfather had been able to assemble the needed funds, my father and his brother, my grandmother, and her mother. The last group left Germany in July 1938, four months before Kristallnacht. It had taken my grandfather five years to get all immediate family members to safety. His travails made me forever appreciate how difficult it can be for people fleeing persecution to find safe haven.
I was born in 1955. My mother was outspoken in her progressive views. It was not beyond her to fire off well-crafted letters to government or business officials when their actions displeased her. My parents were hardly far left—during college I had long debates with my very capitalist father about the merits of socialism—but they had a strong sense of right and wrong.
The news was not a big topic of conversation at the dinner table, but we were regular subscribers to the Chicago Tribune (which I delivered for pocket money for several years as a young boy). We often watched the nightly news on television. I was very aware of the Vietnam War and the protests against it. I also vividly remember watching on TV the police repression of protesters during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. My first memory of witnessing a human-rights violation was of an execution during the Biafran war in Nigeria that, disturbing as I found it, somehow made it onto an evening broadcast.
My father gave us our first taste of politics. With four children in the Deerfield public school system, he ran for and won a seat on the local school board, ultimately serving as its chair. My siblings and I were his campaigners, walking a good part of the town distributing leaflets door to door.
When the village held a referendum on whether to consolidate the two school districts in the town, my father and most of the people in our school district opposed it; they felt the proposed combined tax rate would be too low to sustain the quality of the schools. Again, he deployed his child-labor campaign team to distribute literature. We were with him in the center of town as he was putting up a poster in the local dry cleaners. Someone from the other school district walked in, and they had a shouting match—something that was very out of character for my usually calm, rational, mild-mannered father. I took from him many of the traits that I would display at Human Rights Watch.
Both my parents were the product of New York City public schools. My father did not think he would go to college—no one from his family ever had—until a high school teacher told him about scholarships. He ended up attending City College in upper Manhattan, which was free, and majored in mechanical engineering. Of his one hundred classmates, he was one of only two to secure a job upon graduation.
My mother, who was born in the Bronx but whose parents had come to the United States to flee the antisemitism in Poland and Belarus, attended Hunter College, also a free city school, and majored in mathematics. My parents met at a dance and seemed to know by the end of the evening that they would marry.
Despite their modest beginnings, my parents were intellectuals of sorts. Both secured master’s degrees at Northwestern University, my father in business, my mother in education. My mother became a high school math teacher, and my father entered the business world, mostly for a company that sold industrial packaging, where he slowly worked his way up the corporate ladder. He had always wanted to be a lawyer but felt in the 1940s that the profession did not welcome Jews. After he retired in his sixties, he attended Northwestern University School of Law for a year. For decades, my parents were members of one or more book groups.
I attended Brown University after falling in love with the beautiful campus and the colonial-era buildings surrounding it. Modest-sized Providence, Rhode Island, where Brown is located, was about as big a city as I could feel comfortable in after my suburban upbringing.
When it came to choosing a profession, I knew I needed some-
thing with a public purpose. I can’t pinpoint a particular reason—it was my reaction to my upbringing and the political era in which I grew up—but it was a deeply engrained part of who I was. I did not think I would be happy with a traditional business career. I decided to become a lawyer because it seemed the most likely path to public service.
By the time I graduated from Yale Law School in 1980, international human-rights work had emerged as a new frontier. Jimmy Carter, the U.S. president at the time, seeking to distance himself from U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and U.S. support for the 1973 coup of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, had made human rights the “soul” of his foreign policy. U.S. support for friendly autocrats was still the rule of the day—it was the Cold War, after all—but Carter raised the bar for how foreign policy would be judged.
I had become interested in international work due to my modest travel abroad. When I was sixteen, my parents for the first time took the entire family to Europe. We landed in Amsterdam, rented a Volkswagen bus (even though my father called Volkswagen Beetles “Hitler mobiles”), and gradually drove through the Netherlands, Belgium, and France until—the real point of the trip—we arrived in Germany. We visited Frankfurt, saw my father’s old apartment building (which, unlike my grandfather’s butcher shop, had survived the Allied bombing), and visited the local Jewish cemetery, where several of my relatives were buried, and the Jewish school where the Nazis had sent my father.
We traveled to the tiny village where my grandfather had grown up, Nieder-Ohmen, about seventy kilometers northeast of Frankfurt. We met an older woman who remembered not only my grandfather but also the day that my great-grandmother had announced his engagement to my grandmother. That woman contacted the mayor, who showed us the small Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town. He said the Nazis had knocked over the tombstones but not destroyed them. Everyone in the cemetery was named Roth or Stern, and it contained the graves of my relatives dating back several generations.
Sadly, my father never taught my siblings and me German. When we were growing up, he was not keen on things German.
In high school, I took French courses but had no aptitude for
the language and little interest in learning it. That changed entirely by chance. While in college, one of my high school friends spent a semester in Quebec City. During a visit, I communicated with the locals in what might best be described as pidgin French, as I searched my memory for fragments from high school. It was the first time the language had come alive for me. It was fun, I found, to communicate in another language. I resolved to go to France the next summer to learn French.
The company that my father worked for had a small subsidiary in France, where I was able to arrange a modestly paid internship. I returned to France after I graduated from college and worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Paris.
Today, the people applying for jobs at Human Rights Watch typically have experience working around the world. I had nothing like that, but it was enough to whet my appetite.
My human-rights career did not begin auspiciously. I signed up for the one human-rights course on offer at Yale Law School, but it was canceled. To this day, I have never taken an academic course on human rights. I graduated from law school and entered a world where human-rights jobs were scarce. In New York, Helsinki Watch, the precursor of Human Rights Watch, had all of two employees. Amnesty International had 150 employees in London—still tiny by today’s standards.
I decided, of necessity, to do human-rights work as a volunteer. Initially, during my brief tenure in private practice and continuing while I was a federal prosecutor, I offered my services on nights and weekends on and off for six years. It speaks to the amateurish nature of the human-rights movement at the time that, when in December 1981, under Soviet pressure, the Polish government declared martial law to quash the independent Solidarity trade-union movement, I, an inexperienced, non-Polish speaker, was assigned to cover Poland.
I was utterly unqualified, but the work hooked me. I monitored events from afar, traveled to Warsaw to meet with the handful of dissidents who were able to operate, and wrote a couple of embarrassingly simplistic reports for publication. I found the dissidents inspiring. Their insistence on working despite government repres-
sion and the periodic jail terms meted out deeply impressed me. It reconfirmed for me that, in whatever way I could, I wanted to join their cause.
More prosaically, my work also made me known within the small circle of human-rights activists in New York. In 1987, when Human Rights Watch (still known as Helsinki Watch, Americas Watch, and Asia Watch) had grown to the vast size of some twenty employees, the board of directors, I was told, felt that Aryeh Neier, who was functioning as CEO though without the formal title, should have a deputy. I was contacted and jumped at the opportunity, despite my trepidation at taking a job that I was unsure my would-be boss wanted to exist. After what seemed like a cursory interview process, including a conversation with what then served as the informal board, I was offered the job.
I was just finishing the traditional four-year stint at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York—the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan. Most of my colleagues were heading off to become partners in major law firms. I was joining a tiny organization that none of them had heard of. They thought I was out of my mind. So did my parents. But I was elated. It was the best professional move I ever made.
I was offered the job in February but was told not to show up until November because Human Rights Watch (still not using that name) had to raise the money to hire me. I could have stayed at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where I had become chief appellate attorney for the criminal division, but the interlude provided a chance to do something different. The investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal was just starting, so I moved to Washington, DC, to join the independent counsel—the prosecutor in charge of the criminal investigation. When the funding became available for the job at Human Rights Watch, I moved back to New York.
I spent the next five years under Aryeh’s mentorship. He had directed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) before moving to Human Rights Watch and was the intellectual architect of the methodology that the organization uses. I was fortunate to have him as my guide and instructor. One essential thing that Aryeh illustrated for me was the possibility of being an activist with intellectual sophistication. It is not my nature to spend lots of time rallying in
the streets or picketing government buildings. Luckily, that was not the job. Aryeh showed me that one could advance human rights by engaging in public-policy debate at the highest levels and maintaining rigorous standards of analysis. That played to my interests and what I thought to be my strengths.
My wife, Annie Sparrow, has analyzed my professional life through the lens of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. She points out that the year of my birth gave me a fortuitous advantage in launching a human-rights career. That is not crazy numerology. As Gladwell notes, many of the generation who first made it big in technology were, like me, born in or around 1955 (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt). They came of age just as many of the big technological advances were occurring, so they were well placed to seize these opportunities.
I am hardly a tech billionaire, but the human-rights movement also came of age with modern communications technology. The development of the movement can be understood in terms of the history of that technology: the faster information could travel, the better we could address abuses in a timely manner. I joined Human Rights Watch shortly before email took off. Indeed, just after becoming executive director in 1993, I received a one-time windfall grant and decided to invest it in the basic infrastructure we needed to begin using email.
From the web to smartphones to social media, communication with and about distant places has become quicker and easier. Human Rights Watch benefited enormously from these communication advances.
Gladwell also talks about the importance of devoting oneself passionately to a task to excel. He writes of the need to spend at least ten thousand hours perfecting a skill to become a top performer. I am sure that I put in many more than ten thousand hours as I worked with the Human Rights Watch staff to develop and apply our strategies. The defense of human rights was never just work; it was exactly what I wanted to be doing. I was happy to devote long hours to it for decades, which enabled me not only to improve the skills that I needed for the job but also to immerse myself sufficiently in the field to feel comfortable innovating.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have held a job that I found so fulfill-
ing. In the terms used by today’s human resource professionals, I set a poor example of work-life balance. The defense of human rights became my life. My closest colleagues as well thought nothing of sending each other messages during weekends or evenings, as events dictated. We built our personal lives around the demands of the job. That is not to say that I was neglectful of personal matters. Unless I was traveling, I made a point of being home for our family dinner at 7:00 p.m. When my two daughters from my first marriage were young, I would bathe them and read them bedtime stories. I explained my work by saying that there were a lot of mean presidents in the world, and my job was to make them be nice. In my daughters’ early years, I restricted trips to a week or ten days at a time and avoided deviations. The work of the remarkable activists who welcomed me into their lives, their culture, and their struggle for basic rights was far more important than glimpsing another tourist attraction.
It could be jarring to jump from a tranquil domestic life to the horrors of the world. I never made a conscious decision to keep a certain emotional distance from this evil, but it helped me to maintain an analytic rigor—and probably enabled me to sustain the work for so many years. I’m not sure that it is a better way to live, but it is who I am.
My personal orientation shaped the approach of Human Rights Watch. Rather than seeking empathetic statements of solidarity with victims, we generated pressure on abusive governments to change. If that seems callous, I can only say I was seeking the best way of eliminating what caused their victimhood. My personal motivation stemmed in large part from outrage that governments could act so cruelly, and I developed an instinct for figuring out a government’s point of vulnerability so we could push back.
Annie, a pediatric intensive-care physician who turned to addressing global public-health issues, repeatedly traveled with our son, and at times me, to the Syrian border at the height of the conflict and to a remote island in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. She was far more emotionally involved with the people affected by violence and abuse than I allowed myself to be. It was not unusual for her to be moved to tears by a person’s plight. She took it as a personal crusade to break down my clinical detachment by introducing me to people directly affected by atrocities whom I might not have spent
much time with. Those experiences left a deep impression on me and are among the most vivid memories I have, but did not fundamentally change my more analytic orientation. I had to maintain that to do my work.
For vacations, I enjoyed traveling with my family. I attended my share of my children’s school events, soccer matches, and playground activities. And for a good two decades and running, I took part in a book group. Given the enormous amount of reading about the real world that I did for Human Rights Watch, I was happy that the group read only fiction.
As Human Rights Watch became a more global institution, my travel schedule became more demanding. By the end, leaving aside the COVID-19 pandemic years, I was spending roughly half my time on the road. It was not always easy to head off yet again to the airport, leaving my family behind, sometimes with anxiety about a challenging destination. But once I landed, I was inevitably drawn into the rush of events and taken by the urgency of the cause.
To maintain this hectic pace, I tried to stay in decent physical shape. For decades I was a runner, usually in New York’s Riverside Park or Central Park. In recent years, I turned to biking. When I traveled, I sought out hotels with a gym. I always made the time for exercise. I often thought through the details of my next article while running or biking because I found I could think more creatively then. It also made me calmer, more focused during the rest of the day, and gave me the endurance to stay energized.
My mother died at age eighty-nine in 2019, my father at age ninety-five in 2021. By the end of his life, he saw how his experience as a young boy had inspired me to do what I could so that others would not have to flee their homes the way he had.
Pressure for Change
Ijoined Human Rights Watch with the glorified title of deputy director, but at first I was mainly a researcher, which is what the organization called its investigators. These early opportunities to be in the field—to work with local activists and conduct investigations—were invaluable and continued to guide me as my responsibilities expanded. They instilled in me an enormous respect for the difficult work of researchers and the importance of deferring to their expertise. They showed me how an investigation could be translated into significant pressure for change. The importance of objective fact-finding, untainted by personal preferences or political views, became part of me. Witnessing firsthand the plight of people subjected to repression and abuse—getting to know them as people rather than as abstractions—also reaffirmed my desire to do humanrights work.
After I had been offered the job at Human Rights Watch, but before I’d started working, I was sent to Czechoslovakia in March 1987 to attend the trial of the “Jazz Section,” a club sanctioned by the Communist Party. Because the club seemed tame enough, it was allowed to publish a newsletter without prior censorship. Rather than the stale agitprop of a Communist organ, it reported on a surprisingly vibrant underground cultural scene, moving well beyond jazz. Its publications became “the most widely read uncensored source of cultural information in the country,” according to The New York Times, with an estimated seventy thousand readers.
Pressure
The government tried to shut down the Jazz Section, but its leaders took the unprecedented step of appealing, and without asking permission, continued to operate pending judicial review. As Karel Srp, its fiery chairman, put it: “We could hardly believe in the 1980s there could be anyone who would want to ban jazz music.” The government responded by prosecuting Srp and four other Jazz Section members in what was the country’s first major political trial of the decade.
We two hundred or so independent observers were not permitted into the Prague courtroom where the trial took place; we had to stand in the courthouse corridor. Among those standing with me was Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright. He, too, was known for pushing the limits of permissible expression. He had been a lead drafter of the Charter 77 declaration calling for respect for human rights, for which he had spent more than four years in prison. As a young and inexperienced human-rights defender, I was thrilled to be standing side by side with someone of his enormous reputation in pursuit of greater freedom for his country. Havel summed up the stakes by saying, “The Jazz Section represents a model of behavior that is dangerous for a centralized power. If everyone acted as they did it would be the end of the totalitarian system.” After the fall of communism in the “Velvet Revolution,” Havel became president of his country.
The trial illustrated the efforts of people in Czechoslovakia to test the limits of permissible public discourse at a time when the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had introduced the idea of glasnost, or openness. Not permitted to watch or hear the legal proceedings, we observers could only cheer as the defendants were brought in and ensure that the world knew of the Communist authorities’ effort to stop the crumbling of their repressive order. The blind obedience that such governments try to inculcate is antithetical to the creativity and spontaneity of endeavors such as art. I wrote about the trial in my first published article for a magazine about religion, politics, and culture called Commonweal. I felt like a footnote to tectonic events, but it was an important step for me. The experience gave me an early indication of the power of independent expression to subvert autocratic governments.
The five defendants were sentenced to short or suspended prison
terms. The judge conceded that their cultural work was “commendable” but insisted that such activities must be “regulated.” It became clear two years later, though, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist governments of Eastern Europe, that the free spirit of the Jazz Section leaders represented the future, their repressors a failing effort to sustain the past. I didn’t have the foresight to see where the country and region were heading, but the experience was electrifying.
My first contact with that new Eastern Europe came in March 1991, when I visited Albania as part of the first nongovernmental humanrights delegation ever received in the country. My colleagues were activists from throughout Europe under the banner of the Viennabased International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. Helsinki Watch, a member, had helped to found the federation with the aim of fostering rights groups across Europe so that criticism of Soviet repression would be less U.S.-centered.
Infatuated with Stalin, Enver Hoxha, the longtime Communist dictator of Albania who had died in 1985, had kept the country an isolated enclave of repression. His paranoia was reflected in the small concrete bunkers that dotted the countryside as a laughable defense against the feared invasion that never came. I was told that couples had begun to use the bunkers for private liaisons. But the brutality of his regime became clear to me as I spoke to some of the victims. During one moving evening sitting on the steps of the main mosque in the central square of Tirana, I spent hours talking with gaunt men who had just been released after serving prison terms of more than twenty years. They described beatings during interrogation, trials without lawyers, regular mistreatment, and arduous work conditions, typically in mines. Many of them had been convicted of “agitation and propaganda” for speaking against the Hoxha dictatorship. Others had been convicted for complaining about economic conditions or writing poetry with, as one put it, “too free a hand.”
The new president, Ramiz Alia, presented himself as a reformer. During our two-hour meeting, he listed his government’s accomplishments in education, health, employment, and life expectancy. Asked whether his party would relinquish power if it lost an immi-
nent election, he said that the party had “always been first violin— sole violin—but if it must, it will get used to being second violin.” But referring to Albanians’ increasingly open displays of discontent, he spoke resentfully of their “collective psychosis,” which he described as people standing “with crossed arms and open mouths waiting for others to feed them.” At least we were able to press him successfully for the release of the remaining political prisoners.
Albania was opening up. In May 1990, the government had rescinded several criminal laws that it had used to silence dissent, and in December, it had proposed a new constitution, which included many rights guarantees. An opposition party, the Democratic Party of Albania, was campaigning vigorously in the country’s first parliamentary elections since the 1920s, which were held just after my visit.
Despite the progress, outrages were still taking place. I visited the port of Durres, where doctors at the local hospital reported two dead and eight wounded after troops stormed a ship filled with people trying to flee to Italy. The would-be emigrants refused to disembark, leading troops to storm the ship.
Our delegation held a news conference in a Tirana hotel to push for reforms, particularly regarding media freedom. Such a news conference would have been unthinkable just a short time earlier. Within a year, Sali Berisha, a charismatic cardiologist, would be elected president, foretelling a more democratic future.
I witnessed a very different transition when I visited Kuwait in May and June 1991, shortly after the U.S. military had repulsed Iraqi troops following Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion. The country was slowly returning to normal—streets had a haunting feel, with many shops still closed, and little pedestrian traffic—but at least Iraqi troops were no longer preying on the locals. I investigated Iraqi abuses and soon realized that Kuwaiti forces, the U.S. government’s allies, were also responsible for serious crimes. President George H. W. Bush’s administration enjoyed the plaudits for having liberated Kuwait from Saddam’s ruthless forces but did not appreciate the spotlight on the vengeful Kuwaiti government it had reinstalled. I sat in a Kuwaiti courtroom as people were prosecuted for alleged collaboration with the occupiers. The suspects repeatedly com-
plained of severe beatings during interrogations, at times displaying scars and damaged limbs. After spending months in appalling conditions of detention and watching fourteen fellow prisoners be beaten to death, they all confessed.
Twenty-four people were charged with producing al-Nida, a proIraqi occupation newspaper. Most admitted having worked for the journal but insisted that Iraqi forces had compelled them. The main “evidence” against them was the supposed testimony of a “secret source” as conveyed by a Kuwaiti intelligence officer who refused to provide any details. It was hardly a fair trial. These outrages gave me ample motivation to reveal the atrocities of the reinstated Kuwaiti government.
Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had supported Saddam’s seizure of Kuwait, evidently seeing him as a strong leader willing to stand up to Israel. Palestinians in Kuwait were blamed for his actions, assumed to share his pro-Iraq sympathies, and targeted as a result.
I received a tip from members of the Palestinian community about a possible mass grave at al-Riqqa cemetery, on the southern outskirts of Kuwait City. As is routine for Human Rights Watch researchers, I was in close touch with many of the Western journalists who had come to Kuwait in the aftermath of liberation. We quickly befriended each other, and the CNN correspondent, overwhelmed by his own assignments, lent me a cameraman as I looked for the mass grave. In a corner of al-Riqqa cemetery, I found a section marked “collective graves,” which contained victims of Iraq’s secret police and many who had died at Kuwaiti hands after liberation. Gravediggers whispered to me that many of the bodies showed signs of torture. One unidentified male buried after liberation was recorded as having been received not from a hospital but from a police station. I gathered my nerve and went to the police station, CNN cameraman in tow, to ask about him. As a citizen of the country that had just liberated them, joined by a reputable news network, I assumed a degree of protection to make inquiries. At the police station, I was told variously that the man had been a drug addict and a car accident victim, but there was no plausible explanation for why his body hadn’t been brought to a hospital morgue.
Three Palestinians and one Iraqi told me they had been brought
to the same police station and were put through a routine so orchestrated that the officers had names for the torture chambers—the party room, the barbecue room, and the drinking-juice room. In those rooms, uniformed troops beat prisoners with sticks and poles, subjected them to electric shocks and burns with cigarettes and heated rods, and forced them to drink what smelled like sewage water. The unidentified male may have succumbed to such treatment.
My sympathies had been with the Kuwaitis for having suffered through Saddam’s occupation, but that was no excuse for Kuwaiti forces’ contemptible behavior afterward. I published an op-ed piece on these atrocities in The New York Times to press Kuwaiti authorities to end them, and my colleagues later produced a major report on postliberation Kuwait abuses: “A Victory Turned Sour.” The experience reminded me of the importance of not prejudging a situation, and examining all sides in any conflict—basic principles that still guide Human Rights Watch investigations.
I had to deliver a similarly difficult message of principle in Haiti. My first visit to the country was in November 1987, nearly two years after the fall of President Jean-Claude Duvalier. I was supposed to observe Haiti’s first free election, except that a few hours into the voting the army decided to stop it. It murdered fourteen people at a polling station in Port-au-Prince, while gunmen drove around the city shooting at random.
As the events were unfolding, I was working in the Holiday Inn hotel in Port-au-Prince, headquarters for the journalists and humanrights defenders who were monitoring the election. The size of our group and its international character made us an unlikely target, but that was not the case for the few observers in the hotel where I spent the night a short distance away. We planned an escape route should an attack occur, but with the hotel perched on a cliff, a quick exit would have been difficult. That evening was when I felt most scared during my many years at Human Rights Watch. With commercial flights halted, the U.S. government chartered a plane so observers could leave.
I continued to follow Haiti closely. On another trip, my colleagues and I visited the Casernes Dessalines, a vast old army barracks in
Port-au-Prince that doubled as a prison where detainees were tortured. The commander was Colonel Jean-Claude Paul, who had a reputation for brutality and murder. We went to see him in the hope that we might deter these abuses by exposing them. As we entered the Casernes, we saw prisoners being ushered out the back, presumably so we could not speak with them. Colonel Paul invited us into his office, which he kept in shadowy darkness, with incense burning and an Uzi submachine gun on his desk. The meeting, in which I did not want to get my interlocutor unduly exercised, was not productive. Paul died in his home soon thereafter from what was said to have been poisoning.
One of the most important public figures working for a democratic transition in Haiti was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a priest at a small parish in Port-au-Prince. A thin, diminutive man, Aristide was a powerful speaker, using wordplay and allusion to rally a crowd. He was impressive, embodying the hopes of the Haitian people to escape decades of ruthless dictatorship.
He was attacked by plainclothes gunmen twice while army troops looked on. The second attack, in September 1988, occurred while he was celebrating mass at his church of St. Jean Bosco. It left thirteen parishioners dead, seventy wounded, and the church burned to the ground. He escaped and went into hiding. When he reemerged and I met with him, there was a worrisome cool reserve. He spoke deliberately, with barely controlled rage. I understood his fury, but feared where it might lead.
A few months later, his decision to run for president excited the Haitian people. In December 1990, under the banner Lavalas, the Flood, he swept Haiti’s first free and fair election with 67 percent of the vote.
As president, Aristide moved quickly to assert civilian authority over the army, firing generals and replacing them with people who he hoped would be reformist. Many army members were resentful, so violence against Aristide and his followers was an ever-present threat. Without a loyal security force, popular violence flourished, often taking the form of “necklacing,” the placing of a gasolinefilled automobile tire around a victim before setting it aflame. It was also known as Père Lebrun, after a tire salesman whose television ads showed him popping his head through his product. Aristide
applauded students when they threatened to use Père Lebrun to force a court to impose life sentences on accused coup leaders, praising it as a defensive tool.
Aristide’s desperation was understandable, but for a president to encourage popular violence was not only a clear violation of the right to life but also a spark for a potential cycle of violence that was unlikely to end well for the Haitian people. Difficult as it was to do, Human Rights Watch, after long having condemned the conduct of the Haitian security forces, published a report criticizing Aristide. I published a critical article in The New York Review of Books and met with Aristide to press him on the issue, to no avail. In September 1991, he was overthrown in a military coup. He later returned to the presidency but was ousted again. Aristide was not in the same league as the military officers he was trying to replace, but it was important not to allow my sympathies for his goals to color my application of human-rights standards.
On my first visit to Cuba, in 1988, I learned the importance of persistence. The Cuban authorities had agreed to the visit to show that their human-rights conditions were not as bad as some Cuban exiles in Miami were claiming. The Cuban leadership was also trying to put on a good face since the UN Commission on Human Rights was considering whether to send an investigative team to Cuba. That gave us leverage.
My colleagues and I were allowed into Havana’s main prison, Combinado del Este, where most long-term political prisoners were held, and given permission to speak with them in a main prison wing. I, however, wanted to see the punishment cells, known as the “Rectangle of Death,” which Cuban human-rights defenders had described to me as horrible. The prison authorities refused. So my colleagues and I sat down in the prison yard and politely refused to leave. Trying to defuse the situation, the authorities claimed not to know anything about any punishment cells, but said we were free to look for them.
Fortunately, Cuban activists had given me a hand-drawn map of its location in a nondescript building that could have passed for a warehouse. Inside, the men were held in tiny, barely lit cells. During the summer, the building was called the “pizzeria” because of the
sweltering conditions. The inmates were fed just enough to keep them alive. By speaking to the occupants, we were able to publicize the conditions and contribute pressure to close it.
Two years later, in 1990, I was again allowed into Cuba, using the pretext of a UN conference on criminal justice. I was joined by José Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean lawyer, longtime director of Human Rights Watch’s program on Latin America, and an enormously effective advocate for human rights throughout the region. We spent as little time as possible at the conference and instead sought to speak to dissidents. For much of the time, we were followed by surveillance officers in three cars who made little effort to conceal their presence.
We visited with a woman who had recently been released from prison and begun mouthing a pro-government line. We wanted to establish whether coercion was behind her conversion. As we left her apartment, we noticed a young couple passionately kissing, but as we started walking away, they immediately followed. That would not be a bad job to have, we joked.
As my responsibilities expanded along with Human Rights Watch, I rarely had time to conduct investigations. My visits to countries were usually confined to the capital and involved a strategy session with local activists, meetings with government officials, and a briefing for journalists. I loved the investigative work because it put me in close touch with the victims of abuse who brought the issues to life, but the local activists who were fighting on their behalf were the most inspiring. As I spent less time in the field, alas, I lost that immediate connection to the people most affected by my work. But I came to recognize that my personal value added—my special skill—was the ability to develop and pursue strategies for pressuring governments. I confess to liking my clashes with abusive leaders because of the goals we were pursuing.
Human Rights Watch had no police force to deploy in defense of human rights, nor could we issue judicial orders for governments to uphold human rights or dangle economic incentives as enticements for better behavior. Rather, shaming was central to the pressure that we exerted on governments to force them to respect rights. That required rigorously investigating misconduct, reporting on it
as quickly and accurately as possible, and shining a spotlight on it through traditional and social media. Where possible, we combined shaming with diplomatic or economic pressure exerted by governments that were sympathetic to the defense of human rights, which required encouraging them to act—as we did for Idlib—and generating media attention when they did not. When we could, we met with officials from abusive governments to drive home the need to reform.
Each step in this process required its own strategies, which we refined over time. The development of these strategies also tracked our evolution as a global institution with significant clout in most corners of the world. These campaigns were of course a team effort, but as head of the organization beginning in 1993, I often played a role in devising and executing them.
Shaming
The capacity to shame begins with the claim made by most governments that they uphold human rights. That has become a pillar of a government’s standing. Obviously, many governments fall short. That discrepancy can be stigmatizing, embarrassing a government before the international community and, most important, its public at home. Shaming is not name-calling; the point is not to stigmatize with epithets but with facts, by portraying a government’s misconduct. Shame is different from guilt. Human-rights abusers may feel no personal remorse whatsoever, but they would prefer to avoid the opprobrium of others. Our job was to force them to behave better regardless of their character.
This is not a matter of “lecturing” governments, as French president Macron, Chinese president Xi Jinping, and Yale law professor Samuel Moyn have disparagingly suggested. Rather, the capacity to shame government leaders is premised on their desire not to be seen as serving only themselves. That even brutal dictators usually care about their reputation is perhaps surprising. They must at least pretend to serve the public, and most members of the public want their rights respected. Even dictators need a large degree of public acquiescence in their rule. The enormous resources that some dictatorships
invest in censorship and propaganda to bolster their human-rights reputations show the importance they attach to it. Rule by brutality and fear can work for some time but is risky, because a disgruntled public is always on the lookout for a way to oust the tyrant.
Abusive governments also care about their reputations because being seen to respect human rights is often the key to unlocking international benefits, such as military or financial aid or favorable terms for trade. An abusive official always wants something from the international community, even if it is just being invited to a major summit so they can be photographed with respected leaders. If we can persuade other governments to withhold desired benefits until human-rights abuses end, we create a powerful incentive for reform.
As I said, Human Rights Watch highlighted the discrepancy between pretense and practice by carefully investigating and reporting on government abuse. That generally required traveling to the scene of the abuse, interviewing victims and witnesses, and compiling as accurate and objective an account as possible of violations.
To prevent the delegitimization that attended exposure of their human-rights shortcomings, governments often resorted to a predictable pattern: First, they tried to cover up, as for example the Chinese government did in trying to hide its mass detention and persecution of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. But in an increasingly connected world, where smartphones are ubiquitous, access to social media is widespread, virtual private networks (VPNs) can circumvent internet censorship, and satellites can peer into remote parts of a country, cover-up is difficult.
Even after we published details about human-rights violations, governments devoted much energy to avoiding bad press. Often, they started by denying our findings and lying about their conduct, as the Russian government did regarding reports of its war crimes in Ukraine. Governments accused us of misunderstanding, of bias, or of being misled, as the Israeli government frequently did regarding reports of its repression and abuse of Palestinians.
These retorts were not terribly effective because we were extraordinarily careful about our fact-finding. From day one, researchers were told that their top priority is accuracy. I would rather have had a researcher come home empty-handed than to return with inaccurate information. We aspired for the sober rather than the sensational,
for exactitude rather than exaggeration. Because we were so careful, we welcomed battles over the facts. A government’s obfuscation and spin went only so far in the face of a detailed recitation of evidence.
Libya under the longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi illustrated our ability to use a government’s concern with its image to make humanrights progress. I visited Libya in January 2006, when Gaddafi was trying to redeem his horrible reputation to attract Western investment. He had stopped supporting terrorism, abandoned his nuclear program, and paid compensation to the victims of the bombing of a passenger airline over Lockerbie, Scotland. His biggest remaining problem was his human-rights record. With that in mind, we approached the government and sought permission to send an investigative team to Libya. Gaddafi agreed.
The sponsor of the trip was, of all people, Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, whom I had met previously and who at the time was eager to portray himself as a reformer and human-rights defender. Five years later, in 2011, the International Criminal Court would charge Saif with crimes against humanity for his conduct in the waning days of his father’s rule, after he had threatened “a river of blood” in Benghazi if protests against his father continued. But in 2005 and 2006, he was helpful to our efforts to secure the release of political prisoners as well as compensation for the families of a notorious prison massacre. Others around his father were less interested in human rights.
For three weeks in April and May 2005, Human Rights Watch was allowed an investigative team in Libya. It was led by Fred Abrahams, an experienced American researcher. Despite some government obstruction, the team secured one-on-one private meetings with prisoners who said there had been certain improvement in prison conditions, and some political prisoners had been released, but serious problems remained.
As a condition of conducting the investigation, we had promised the Libyan government to present our findings in advance of the planned publication of our report. That brought me to Tripoli. Working with Saif Gaddafi’s organization, we had identified 131 political prisoners. Most had spent seven or more years in detention after
unfair trials for nonviolent activity. Our aim was to secure their release, but when we shared our critical findings with midlevel officials, our hosts exploded (or, more likely, pretended to explode). We had to endure a charade of anger and hurt feelings. We were accused, among other things, of not understanding Libya. They kept suggesting that publication of the report should be delayed and seemed to think that they could bludgeon us into not publishing it at all.
I let their tirade go on for a while, then said that we were going to hold a news conference a few days later in Cairo, where journalists would undoubtedly ask us about our meetings in Tripoli. We could say: “All they did was yell at us.” Or we could say: “The conversations were productive, and they promised various reforms.” Which would it be? I asked. The Libyans, visibly taken aback, said they would have to consult their superiors.
The next morning, we sat in our hotel lobby wondering if the whole trip had been for naught. That afternoon, however, we received word that we would be seen again. This time, the officials spoke apologetically of a “misunderstanding.” The deputy interior minister offered to let us look at files stacked on his desk about political prisoners we had identified. We discussed several of them. Five weeks later, I was gratified to learn that the 131 political prisoners we had spotlighted had been released.
Investigations
At Human Rights Watch, as I’ve said, researchers’ ability to affect government policy lies in the power of the information they collect and the expertise they develop about a country or issue. One often ignored element of our influence is that we could pay people who were, or became, experts—that is, we hired people who often knew more about a topic than virtually anyone else. When I raised enough money to hire a new researcher, I was buying the capacity to develop and maintain expertise. Properly deployed, it could move governments. That was a huge incentive for me to keep fundraising.
Researchers came from various backgrounds—lawyers, journalists, academics, activists. The best ones had in common persistence—the