The long-time head of Human Rights Watch discusses taking on the biggest villains and toughest autocrats around the world.

Kenneth Roth spent nearly three decades directing Human Rights Watch and building it into a powerful global institution. His first book, Righting Wrongs, combines memoir and analysis to refute the skeptics who question whether it is possible to defend human rights effectively. Roth pulls back the curtain on the strategies and tactics that Human Rights Watch and its allies employed to force governments to behave better.

At a time of global instability and rising right-wing extremism, Roth provides an insider’s view of how it is possible for a relatively small group of people—through persistence and creativity—to move even the most powerful and despotic governments.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Kenneth Roth is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He has extensively investigated human rights abuses around the world, focusing especially on the world’s most dire situations, the pursuit of international justice, the major powers’ foreign policies, the work of the UN, and the global contexts between democracy and autocracy. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and other major publications. He spends his time between New York and Geneva.

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Kenneth Roth © Leigh Vogel, Getty Images