Kenneth Roth is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Until August 2022, he served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations. He built the organization into a global institution operating in some 100 countries, with 550 staff members and an annual budget of $100 million. Before that, Roth was a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington.
A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigative and advocacy missions around the world, meeting with dozens of heads of state and countless ministers. He is quoted widely in the media and has written hundreds of articles on a wide range of human rights issues, devoting special attention to the world’s most dire situations, the conduct of war, the foreign policies of the major powers, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between autocracy and democracy.
Roth’s first book, “Righting Wrongs,” was published by Knopf in February 2025. It offers an insider’s view of the strategies used by Human Rights Watch to put pressure on governments to respect human rights, drawing on his years of experience. Debunking the skeptics, it demonstrates with repeated examples how pressure can move even the most powerful and recalcitrant governments.