The warm glow of lamplight flickered across the wine-colored walls of Kenneth Roth’s New York City apartment as students trickled in, their gazes landing on the framed sketches lining the living room. Unlike typical works of art, these drawings—etched in crayon on simple white paper—painted a tragic yet powerful report. Sudanese children, displaced by war, had drawn what they had seen: militias setting their villages ablaze, families fleeing into the vast and merciless terrain, and bombs falling from above. Standing before us students, Roth explained how Human Rights Watch (HRW) had given the children crayons while their parents provided testimonials to researchers. The drawings could easily have been discarded, but Roth and his team preserved them to evoke the deep and lasting wounds left by war, how they reverberate across generations, and how they shape worldviews ripe with cynicism. This was only one of the many ways Roth had taught us through lessons that went beyond theory and law. In the fall of 2023, he welcomed his first cohort of Princeton University students into his home, marking the conclusion of his inaugural teaching term with a celebration.

In his apartment’s quaint living room, Roth sat circled by students who quietly absorbed his subdued recounting of lessons from his time demanding accountability from the world’s worst human rights violators. Overflowing with books ranging from Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s To End a War, the room itself embodied his reputation as the “Godfather of Human Rights”—a space where he continued to teach, far from the front lines but no less impactful.

Roth didn’t just command attention—he invited it. Many might expect the longtime head of HRW to be a provocateur, someone who wielded outrage like a dagger. Instead, he is measured and meticulous, a man who prefers precision over emotional pleas for action. It was evident to many of his students that he spoke the way he fought: methodically, persistently, with a rationale so airtight it left little room for rebuttal. Yet through it all, there was a smile—welcoming, disarming – that could convince his worst foes to change their course and work on his side.

Roth only formally began teaching in September 2023 as the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). In hindsighting it became abundantly clear to me — as one of his first students — that Roth had been a teacher long before he stepped into a classroom. His tried and true methods conveyed to us through his experiences informed by decades of working on the world’s most dire human rights crises, are a rare blend of intellectual rigor and a calculated strategy.

Human Rights Advocacy In Its Early Stages

 Initially drawn to the stability of a traditional academic career, Roth had once seriously considered becoming a law professor, he revealed in an interview with The Nassau Weekly. However, he spent nearly three decades leading hands-on efforts to hold the world’s worst human rights violators accountable. This shift from a predictable career to demanding creativity and out-of-the-box thinking is now a core lesson he imparts to his students.

Earlier in Roth’s career, the field of human rights protection and law took shape with few established career pathways. While the ’60s gave birth to the civil rights and anti-war movements, it was only towards the mid-70s that President Jimmy Carter shifted American foreign policy away from the solely national interest based, realpolitik approach to a foreign policy guided by moral principles, human rights, and democratic values, nuclear proliferation, and global poverty. 

Even Roth himself had never undergone formal education in human rights. In fact, the only human rights course at his law school was canceled just as he was about to take it. Motivated by the “outrage by repressive governments,” to make a difference in the field, Roth found ways to get involved in his spare time. For instance, while working as a federal prosecutor in New York, he devoted his weekends and nights to volunteering on human rights cases like the Soviet imposition of martial law in Poland.

“I went into the meat market, you know, did a bunch of interviews, got a bunch of offers, and was about to take one, when a job opened up at Human Rights Watch,” Roth said. “[I] never regretted that decision, but when it finally came time to leave Human Rights Watch, after basically three decades running it, I still wanted to go back to teaching.”

 While much time has passed since Roth’s early career, he still identifies a job deficit in this field and advises students who want to work in human rights to be open to unconventional pathways. “If you’re really passionate about something, find a way to do it,” Roth said. “The bottom line is take risks and follow your heart, even if it isn’t the full-time job, even if it isn’t the perfect job.”

Building Human Rights Watch From The Ground Up

 At Human Rights Watch (HRW), Roth transformed the nonprofit from a small organization of 20 employees into one of the world’s leading human rights advocacy groups, boasting over 550 experts, lawyers, and practitioners. HRW was founded in 1978 with the initial mission to monitor the Soviet Union’s compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, a landmark agreement signed by 35 countries during the Cold War, aimed at improving East-West relations, promoting human rights, and fostering economic and security cooperation. It was an era of hope for change in Europe as the Soviet Union began to show its cracks. Roth’s tenure as the organization’s second Executive Director developed it into an internationally respected global watchdog documenting human rights abuses and creating government accountability.

 Government accountability depended on creative approaches often bypassing ineffective and broken legal and judicial systems. “In most places where Human Rights Watch works, the courts don’t function. The judges have been compromised, corrupted, or killed, so the courts do not serve as a check on governmental abuse,” Roth explained.

 Consequently, effective humanitarian efforts come down to public pressure. “Instead, what you need to do is put pressure on the political branches of government by harming their reputation, shaming them for what they do, and by figuring out how you can enlist powerful third party governments to, in turn, put diplomatic or economic pressure on the target. It’s a matter of figuring out what does the target government care about, and how can you condition that on better behavior?”

 While at HRW, Roth prioritized advocacy driven by expert-led, fact-based research, a skill he continues to emphasize among his students at Princeton today. “He knew it wasn’t enough for Human Rights Watch to have an opinion. It needed to have the most authoritative information about the situations it was commenting on around the world,” said Tom Malinowski, who worked with Roth as Washington Director for HRW before becoming Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Former Congressman Malinowski was a lecturer at SPIA in the fall of 2024 and a colleague of Roth.

This emphasis on rigorous research became a hallmark of HRW’s credibility and effectiveness under Roth’s leadership, and his commitment to confronting injustice has remained unwavering. “It gets me up every morning because I really think, how can I increase the pressure on this awful government to change?” Roth said. “[At HRW] we didn’t spend a lot of time building solidarity with victims. We focused on putting pressure on the bad guys—changing the cost-benefit analysis of oppression to make them pay a price.”

 He acknowledged that this combative tendency, while not part of his personal relationships, defined his public life. “That fight,” he said with a deepened tone, “is who I am.” Yet those who know Roth understand that his combativeness is not bluster but something more deliberate. He is both incisive and compassionate, unyielding yet incredibly giving. In class, I noticed him challenging students on their positions while engaging as a teacher, always eager to hear the other side and ready to elevate the conversation—not silence it.

 Even before transitioning into his role as a professor, Roth taught those around him. “He taught me almost everything I know about human rights and the law organization with a set of values. He grounded me and the legal foundations that underpin the human rights movement,” shared Malinowski. “I’m not a lawyer, but Ken was my law professor, you know,” Malinowski added that he deeply admires Roth, crediting his time at HRW under Roth’s leadership as a powerful influence in his career.

 “It was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because I joined an organization that he built into a principled powerhouse,” Malinowski said. “He’s been single minded. He has been passionately dedicated, his entire life, to the cause of human rights and holding governments accountable to their obligations.”

Teaching From the Frontlines to Princeton’s Classrooms

After his own storied career shaping the field of human rights, Roth is fostering the next generation of student leaders at Princeton to fight for international justice and accountability. Rather than teaching law, as he had originally envisioned, he pivoted to the policy space.

“At that stage [after stepping down from HRW], I really wanted to teach at a public policy school, not at a law school, because I thought that what I had to offer was really more about, ‘how do you get things done?’ rather than ‘what is the letter of the law?” Roth noted.

 At Princeton, Roth’s ability to understand the incentives that underpin government actions is handy when teaching students about effective advocacy. “He was fluent in the language of international human rights and humanitarian law, but he also understood how to talk to governments about their interests, how to persuade powerful people that it was, in fact, in their interest to abide by these rules,” Malinowski explained with a tone of admiration for his former boss.

In September, I joined his first graduate seminar, SPI 556c: Strategies for Enforcing Human Rights, where the class examined successful tactics in getting governments that violate human rights to act. He drew from his own experiences at HRW, highlighting tactics such as naming and shaming, creative coalition building, and open-source investigation. As one of two undergraduates enrolled in his course, I heard from a diverse set of SPIA Master in Public Affairs students who hailed from careers as journalists, U.S. Foreign Service Officers to Japan’s Ministry of Economy officers, and discussed both effective and ineffective advocacy approaches.

Class discussions spanned the milestones of Roth’s career in human rights, from HRW’s pivotal role in the 1997 International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL)—earning the ICBL and activist Jody Williams a shared Nobel Peace Prize—to Roth’s viral detention at Hong Kong’s International Airport.

 As Roth prepares to release his book “Righting Wrongs,” on February 25th, 2025, he returned to Princeton in September 2024 to teach a new undergraduate course, SPI 493: Global Perspectives.

 This class indeed adopted the perspective of twelve different governments weekly, understanding the world through each government’s interests and values. “I was just aware that so many classes at SPIA focus on what things look like in Washington, and so I was determined not to do that. And so the purpose of that class is each week, we figuratively position ourselves in a different capital around the world, and we look at the world from that capital.”

 The class, which is also inspired by the case study-style chapters of his book, reflects Roth’s deep commitment to inducing governments to respect the human rights of their citizens. “My book has some qualities of a memoir to it, but it really is a book about the [human rights protection] strategies that are used, and shows what works and what doesn’t work,” Roth explained.

 “Debating contemporary case studies and hearing about [Roth’s personal] experiences, I’ve developed new ideas of how to create high-impact accountability strategies,” said Uma Fox ’26, a former student of Roth’s who interned last summer at the Department of Justice’s Human Rights and the Special Prosecutions Section.

 Hadi Kamara ’26 explained that before taking Global Perspectives, he was “discouraged” by the fleeting legitimacy of international law. “What Professor Roth’s class showed me is that there are ways and methods to enforce international law that don’t solely rely on the compliance of the target state and their functions and mechanisms within the international system,” he said. “But a whole host of people can enact human rights law and make sure that’s enforced globally. And I think that kind of reinvigorated my belief in the legitimacy of international law,” Kamara added.

 While the defense of international human rights has come a long way since its codification with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Roth reflected on the breakout of conflicts around the globe and concerns relating to the recent presidential election.

“This is the moment when you’ve got to stand up for the principles. One of the key points I try to emphasize in my classes is that the defense of human rights isn’t about quick victories—it requires persistence,” Roth concluded. “This is not a moment for despair but for re-engagement.”