Kenneth Roth

Kenneth Roth (born 23 September 1955) is an American attorney who has been the executive director of Human Rights Watch since 1993.

Kenneth Roth, a graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, claims he was drawn to human rights causes through his family ties. He said that his father would keep his three young sons quiet as he cut their hair by telling tales of their grandfather's butcher shop in Frankfurt, Germany. Roth stated that as they grew older, his father told them about living under the Nazis as a young boy and fleeing Germany in July 1938.

Jimmy Carter’s introduction of human rights as an element of US foreign policy in the late 1970s further inspired Roth to take on human rights as a vocation, Roth has claimed.

Prior to starting at Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 1987, Roth worked in private practice as a litigator and served as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington DC.

During the early years of his work in human rights movement, Roth focused on the Soviet imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981.

Roth joined Human Rights Watch in 1987 as deputy director. His initial work centered on Haiti, which was just emerging from the Duvalier dictatorship but continued under military rule. Since then, Roth has travelled internationally on behalf of Human Rights Watch.

His biography on the HRW website claims he has "special expertise on: issues of justice and accountability for atrocities committed in the quest for peace; military conduct in war under the requirements of international humanitarian law; counterterrorism policy, including resort to torture and arbitrary detention; the human rights policies of the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations; and, the human rights responsibilities of multinational businesses."

Roth has published numerous articles, newspaper op-eds, and articles in academic journals, covering a wide range of issues, including "Domestic Violence as an International Human Rights Issue", in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives; "The Case for Universal Jurisdiction"; "The Charade of US Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties"; and "The Law of War in the War on Terror - Washington's Abuse of Enemy Combatants" His Twitter handle is @KenRoth.

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