The Shirley and Leonard Goldstein Lecture on Human Rights

Goldstein Lecture on Human Rights-2000

KENNETH ROTH is the executive director of Human Rights Watch, a post he has held since 1993. From 1987 to 1993 he served as deputy director of the organization. Previously, he was a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the Iran-contra investigation in Washington. He also worked in private practice as a litigator.

Mr. Roth has conducted human rights investigations in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. He has devoted special attention to issues of justice and accountability for gross abuses of human rights, standards governing military conduct in time of war, the human rights policies of the United States and the United Nations, and the human rights responsibilities of multinational businesses. He has written extensively on a range of human rights topics in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Nation, and the New York Review of Books. He appears often in the major media, including NPR, the BBC, CNN, PBS, and the principal U.S. networks. He has testified repeatedly before the U.S. Congress as well as before the French Parliament and the United Nations.

A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Mr. Roth was drawn to the human rights cause in part by his father's experience fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938. He began working on human rights after the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981, and soon also became deeply engaged in fighting military repression in Haiti. In his seven years as executive director of Human Rights Watch, the organization has doubled in size while adding special projects devoted to refugees, children's rights, academic freedom, international justice, and the human rights responsibilities of multinational corporations.

Mr. Roth, 44, lives in Manhattan with his wife and two daughters.