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The Limits of Rights

Kenneth Roth’s memoir misses the point ? Alex William

Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments by Kenneth Roth. Knopf, 448 pages. 2025.

“Human rights”: the term doesn’t really do the work that we think it does.

According to natural law theory, a human right is a fundamental and inalienable possession which entitles one, naturally, to certain freedoms. Rights, the theory goes, are innately held by human beings by virtue of their human status, and these rights are in some sense discovered or revealed through treaties like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). To invoke human rights is to invoke an ethical demand, a kind of baseline standard for treatment.

But a right—human or otherwise—is a legal concept, and thus a political one as well. It entails a series of claims and corresponding duties. If I have the right to form a union, that entails a duty on my employer and my government to recognize that union. If I have a right to free speech, it entails a duty on my government not to interfere with or restrict my speech acts. But there are also second-order rights, which belong only to the state and other governing or regulatory bodies (such as the World Trade Organization, for example). These rights regulate who is able to change or enforce the law, and who may exempt persons or entities from the law by granting immunities. 

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt emphasized the political dimension of human rights to refute natural law theory: “The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human.” Here Arendt was referring to the Shoah, but the idea is equally applicable to the present genocide in Gaza or the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. The loss of citizenship, or its prior denial in the case of Gaza, renders rights claims dismissible to the rights-granting body. The bind becomes clear: rights claims have no authority, no performative reality, unless the state recognizes and consents to the claim. Each rights claim, then, presupposes a hierarchical power structure vis-à-vis the rights holder, who is necessarily subordinated to the rights granting power.

On the international level, the situation becomes even more complex. The “international community” has adjudicative and political bodies like the International Criminal Court and the United Nations. But within these bodies, individual or collective human rights claims can only be made against states, which are then tasked with internally effectuating treaties and the judgements of international courts. Despite international bodies’ second-order ability to pronounce judgements requiring states to enforce human rights treaties—the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, for example, has a robust body of case law regarding the enforcement of women’s rights in Latin America—states are ultimately able to decide whether they conform to these rulings and the treaties on which they are based. All international human rights law thus exists primarily as a discourse, one which carries more or less persuasive power (but not coercive power) depending on the political moment. 

The discourse of the international human rights system makes claims to universality, but its legal structure retrenches the primacy of states within the world-system and thus its manner of separating peoples by circumscribing them within pockets of (almost) exclusive control. Only states can sign treaties, making the world-system itself only an archipelago of sovereignty incapable of operating as a singular entity. A legal claim by, say, the exploited and oppressed miners of the world against the world-system as such would fail for the simple reason that such a claim, regardless of its righteousness and adherence to the discourseof international human rights, is not actually cognizable by the world-system, or by the states within it.

The limits and pitfalls of human rights inhere in their fundamental conception. And yet, since the founding of the United Nations and the drafting of the UDHR, human rights have nevertheless served as a powerful tool for regulating the behavior of states for the better. Within the United States, no human rights organization has been more prominent than Human Rights Watch (HRW), particularly under the leadership of the recently retired Kenneth Roth. Roth, a former Department of Justice attorney, joined HRW in the late 1980s as a deputy director and quickly rose to become the executive director, a position he held for almost thirty years. In this role, Roth was largely responsible for HRWs evolution into the world’s premier human rights organization. Despite achieving these heights, his career, summed up in his recent memoir Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, ultimately reveals the profound limitations of human rights work as currently constituted and signals the urgent need for a new paradigm to address a world in crisis.

Roth’s book is, plainly, very bad. In some ways, its failure is a bit surprising. Roth has proven himself to be a more than competent writer over the years, publishing good work in places like the New York Review of Booksand theGuardian, and HRW’s reports are generally rigorously researched and argued, and much less dry than other NGO offerings. Unlike his articles or reports, however, Righting Wrongsis a low-effort affair—a failure for which Roth is as much to blame as his publisher (who, not unreasonably, probably looked at the name and the deteriorating domestic and global political situation and saw dollar signs) and editors (or, evidently, lack thereof). 

The prose is tedious—much of the book reads like a cover letter for a job he already had. We are bafflingly treated to a full page in which Roth explains the ways his wife “has analyzed [his] professional life through the lens of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers.” He is sure he’s put in “many more than ten thousand hours” into human rights work, which, he writes, “enabled me to not only improve the skills that I needed for the job but also to immerse myself sufficiently in the field to feel comfortable innovating.” (Impressive: hired!). Cliches abound: within the first forty-five pages we are treated to Martin Luther King’s “arc of the moral universe” quote, Margaret Mead’s “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens, can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has,” and Martin Niem?ller’s “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a communist” (ironic given Roth’s deep-seated anticommunism). 

Beyond the dull prose, the book offers little insight into Roth as a person. On his lifelong desire to work for a public purpose, he only tells us “I can’t pinpoint a particular reason . . . but it was a deeply ingrained part of who I was.” There’s equally little insight into HRW’s internal processes. Where the book doesn’t read like a CV or list of yearbook quotes, it reads like a travel itinerary—all that’s missing are invoices and receipts. In-depth analyses of human rights issues or stories about risky missions are largely eschewed for name dropping and dry, surface-level reports of meetings.

A favorite passage is Roth’s story about meeting late Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi, who collaborated with the United States in the so-called war on terror and also, relatedly, brutally cracked down on domestic dissent. Roth first met Meles in 2009 in Addis Ababa, where they talked for two unproductive hours. In 2010, Meles invited Roth to meet with him in his hotel room at the Munich Security Conference, where they spoke for another unproductive, but slightly friendlier two hours. Almost no details are given about the content of either conversation. The story ends abruptly: “I did not persuade him to ease his repression, but I took his openness to discussing his rule as modestly encouraging. Alas, he died in 2012 at age fifty-seven.” Bye, Meles—onto the next meeting. 

The book is at its most interesting—or, I should say, is only interesting—in the rare moments where Roth expounds a bit on his own ideology. These moments reveal and locate, however obliquely, Roth the figure within the liberal international order. His and HRW’s prominence has allowed the organization to operate with impressive competence in a number of countries and across a number of fields, but HRW’s global institutionalization has also blinkered its political horizons, revealing the practical and material limits of human rights.

Within its conceptual limits, Roth is in many ways the best that the liberal international order has to offer. Under his tenure, HRW forcefully condemned the U.S. torture program and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, along with other U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organization also charged Israel with the crime of apartheid and has long criticized its intermittent slaughters in Gaza. The strength of HRW’s work on Palestine from within the limits of the liberal establishment has made Roth an object of intense hatred by Zionists in particular. Roth has been highly critical of Israel in the past, and HRW has called Israel’s actions genocidal, but Roth conspicuously devotes little attention to the charge in this book, except to point out that the International Court of Justice “ordered Israel to refrain from various acts that might implicate the rights of Palestinians in Gaza under the Genocide Convention.” The only other mention of genocide with respect to Israel constitutes only a weak and implicit endorsement of the veracity of the charge, and still, it is couched in a prior condemnation of Hamas.

And while the United States is a co-perpetrator of the genocide in Gaza, Roth had only this to say of Joe Biden’s complicity: “Biden treated far too gingerly Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his far-right government deepens the apartheid that Washington would not name and pummeled and starved Palestinian civilians in Gaza after Hamas had killed and abducted civilians in Israel.” The phrase “far too gingerly” hardly describes supplying unwavering political cover from the UN Security Council, intensifying domestic repression of those demanding a ceasefire and arms embargo, and providing Israel $17.9 billion dollars in military aid since October 7. 

Elsewhere, Roth displays a commitment to international criminal justice that misses the geopolitical forest for the domestic trees. He is rightfully proud of HRW’s role in promoting the use of universal jurisdiction by European states to prosecute Bashar al-Assad regime torturers. He likewise celebrates his role in pushing back against Donald Trump’s sanctions against the International Criminal Court. But he mistakes realpolitik support for international criminal law for principled commitment. Roth touts the Biden administration’s endorsement of the ICC investigation into Russian war crimes in Ukraine, despite Russia’s non-membership in the court, as an evolution in the U.S. position on territorial jurisdiction. But the position has only evolved with respect to Russia—both Biden and Trump opposed the ICC’s exercise of jurisdiction over Israel and the United States (for war crimes in Afghanistan) under the same theory of jurisdiction.

This naivete, or conscious hypocrisy, is the inevitable result of Roth’s position as a liberal, ensconced within a liberal worldview. We see that HRW, as the liberal human rights organization par excellence, will never endorse the kind of revolutionary change that would actually make the human rights system live up to its stated ideals. In a world-system dominated by the United States and, secondarily, its allies, HRW’s starry-eyed universalism will always, intentionally or not, redound to the interests of the most powerful states within this system despite their egregious violations of, well, human rights.

One way the human rights system rationalizes its limitations is by placing economic and social rights outside its purview, or paying very little attention to them at all. Economic and social rights are enshrined in a number of treaties, most prominently the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, of which the United States is one of only twenty-four non-ratifying states. These rights, to be progressively implemented, include both intra-state rights like the right to universal health care, as well as inter-state rights, like the right to “an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need.”

Roth’s hollow defense of HRW’s relative inattention to economic and social rights is that many of these issues “are too political for an international human-rights group to address effectively.” But all human rights are political, and all would have tenuous claims to universality without the constant, hard-fought battle to create international consent around various norms. As Samuel Moyn—a legal scholar and particular target of Roth’s ire throughout Righting Wrongs—has argued in Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, the dominance of market fundamentalism over the welfare state in the 1970s superseded global justice aspirations, and “human rights conformed to the political economy of the age, not defining it but reflecting it.” Moyn writes that in a neoliberal era “human rights lost their original connection with a larger egalitarian aspiration, [instead] focusing on sufficient provision.” 

Roth skirts over this ideological explanation to frame HRW’s disinterest in economic questions as a matter of incapacity or lack of expertise—even though Roth frequently notes in the book that he continually broadened the scope of HRW’s organizational expertise to deal with, say, the use of internationally prohibited arms such as mines or cluster munitions, or to build the organizations women’s rights program during his tenure. On theoretically publishing a chart of global inequality, he writes: “We had no capacity to conduct that specialized investigation; we would have had to publish someone else’s numbers.” On the issue of comparative tax rates for the wealthy: “again, we have no special expertise or value added in this area.” He adopts a narrow definition of economic inequality, one slightly at odds with HRW itself. Economic inequality has an important international dimension: it looks like a border system that locks certain workers into low wage zones and ensures that migrant workers who do make it to wealthy countries are subject to hyper-exploitation under threat of deportation. It looks like structural adjustments imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which ravages states’ public assets in favor of privatization, redounding to the benefit of Western investors and their local cronies. It looks like rapacious and neocolonial extraction of natural resources in the global south by Western corporations which then ferry the profits back to their home countries, leaving environmental and social devastation in their wake. 

While Roth personally fails to acknowledge these harms in Righting Wrongs, HRW has written reports that implicate the IMF or the international border exploitation system in human rights abuses, to name two examples. Such reports, however, remain a product of the liberal institution which produced them, and their critique is limited to a call for a more conscientious IMF and a more just border system, or a more just liberal economic and politics order. Roth’s fundamental myopia about the fact that civil and political rights depend upon economic and social rights for their realization amounts to a pointed refusal to engage questions like how a robust respect for the right to life can survive alongside the ravages of poverty, how the right to be free from racial discrimination might survive the economic hyper-exploitation of the largely black and brown Global South majority by the largely white Global North, or how the right to freedom of speech might survive the entry of wealth into politics as anything more than a formal right to chatter without influence or consequence.

In other words, it pens HRW’s impact into a perennially reformist ambit. HRW has, as Roth points out, issued some important reports on economic and social issues (including an excellent report on economic and environmental “sacrifice zones” in Louisiana), but reports on, say, protections for mine workers in the Global South do not critique the global economic system which allows their brutal exploitation in the first place. To realize UHDR Article 28, which enshrines the collective right to an international order in which other rights enshrined in the declaration—like the right to recognition before the law, or the right to be free from torture and other cruel or degrading treatment—something more is required. 

Roth’s willful ignorance toward economic rights carries over into a complete distortion and devaluation of collective rights, which largely revolve around the rights of minority groups to practice their own religion, speak their own languages, and maintain unique cultural identities separate from the identity of a state’s majority. Roth writes in his chapter on China that “at times [China] promotes collective rights, but the purpose of rights is to protect the individual from the collective.” This statement is descriptively untrue, and somewhat confusing considering that some of the very violations for which he condemns China—namely its mistreatment of the Uyghur minority—are paradigmatic violations of collective rights. 

Part of the reason collective rights are given short shrift by liberal human rights institutions is that acknowledging them would compel institutions to take up human rights as a radical discourse of emancipation, which is often at odds with the primacy of individual rights. Take, for instance, South Africa’s recent expropriation act, which allows for the expropriation of property without compensation (after certain conditions have been met) in order to address the fact that even thirty years after the fall of apartheid rule, the majority of South African farmland is owned by the country’s white minority. (President Trump has unsurprisingly rallied in favor of the White landowners’ individual rights.)

Apartheid may have been dismantled as the prevailing political order, but its economic traces continue to plague the country, largely along racialized lines. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights enshrines the right to self-determination, i.e., to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” In South Africa, decolonization remains an inchoate project—self-determination both requires and is a means of asserting collective freedom from economic domination. Redistributing the Boer’s land emerges, then, as a means of enforcing the right of self-determination for black South Africans. Trump is not entirely wrong to cast expropriation without compensation as a human rights violation, but this reveals human rights law’s failure to account for a robust interpretation of self-determination. 

In other words, the lack of attention paid to collective rights expose human rights as a depoliticizing concept. When, for example, one refers to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians as a “human rights violation,” it abstracts this violence from its colonial context, which is premised upon the erasure of the Palestinian people as a political and national entity. Situating Israeli violence within a rights discourse simultaneously reinforces the hierarchy between rights-granter and rights-holder while creating a formal (but not actual) equality before the law, which cannot cognize the significant power imbalance between colonized and colonizer. This is because reframing political questions as juridical ones redounds to a liberal legalism that has no theoretical place for revolutionary struggle. The practical consequences of this emerge most clearly in the struggle for national liberation, in which a people seeks to overthrow the present legal order and to become both rights-holder and granter. The legal form has no ability to apprehend this; it would seek to convert such a struggle back into a dispute over discrete harms. 

As Noura Erakat and John Reynolds argue with respect to the Palestinian liberation struggle, echoing Mezna Qato and Kareem Rabie, “Law-based advocacy ends up being geared ‘towards a better colonialism rather than the end of colonialism’.” By fixating on Israel’s excesses and not Zionism’s essence, legalist advocacy elides the state’s settler-colonial nature and the underpinning structures of imperialism and capitalism. In this sense, as Erakat and Reynolds write, it is “problematic to pivot movement strategy on bodies of law that emerged in order to regulate imperialism, and that often function to legalize Israeli colonization.”

Roth’s writing on Israel and Palestine conforms to Erakat and Reynolds’s critique. He is “highly critical” of “the PA’s systematic use of arbitrary detention and torture to silent dissent,” but describes Palestinian statehood and sovereignty as “issues we did not take a stand on.” Here again, Roth has privileged one set of rights over another—the discrete over the transformational. Though the right to self-determination is a human right enshrined in various international treaties and covenants, Roth and the HRW refuse to engage with the fact that denial of Palestinians’ right to self-determination is the fount from which the other human rights abuses they suffer spring. One cannot reform Israel into self-abolition. In this context, rectifying human rights violations without also forcefully endorsing the right to self-determination looks only like palliative care. 

Evidently, a true commitment to human rights would require us to think outside the human rights framework altogether. HRW’s preferred tactic is to “name and shame” perpetrators of human rights abuses, a tactic which has served HRW well over the years but may have now outlived its usefulness. Roth’s commitment to the international legal order has made it difficult for him to see that the world is changing. Over the last two years, the United States, along with Israel, have jointly carried out a genocide in Gaza, attacked the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and the UN. Israel has both literally shredded the UN charter on the floor of the General Assembly and also killed numerous UN workers since October 7. Both countries have engaged in aggressive warfare for decades, in direct contravention of the UN charter. The United States continues to arm and finance abusive regimes around the world, like India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel, and the Trump administration has put U.S. gunboat diplomacy into overdrive in Latin America and the Middle East, explicitly embracing might-makes-right as a governing ethos. Even the weak regulation of international human rights bodies is crumbling—when confronted with evidence of their abuses, world governments increasingly meet accusations with a shrug.?

This requires a reevaluation of tactics. The problem facing the world is not merely an insufficient enforcement of human rights—the result of burgeoning autocracy, disinformation, political division within democracies, and identity politics, as Roth would have it—but the enforcers themselves. To return to Arendt: as a corollary to her refutation of natural law theory, she introduced the concept of the right to have rights, or the right to be a juridically cognizable subject that may make rights claims. But when the legal order itself is rotten, rights claims are not enough. Instead of the right to have rights, the world’s oppressed must have the ability to make rights—to appropriate the powers of creation and enforcement for themselves.