Kenneth Roth is a lecturer in law, senior research scholar in law, and Oscar M. Ruebhausen Visiting Scholar at Yale Law School and lecturer at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. He is also a Guardian U.S. columnist. For three decades, until August 2022, he was the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations. Previously, Roth was a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington.
A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigative and advocacy missions around the world, meeting with dozens of heads of state and countless ministers. He is quoted widely in the media and has written hundreds of articles on a wide range of human rights issues, devoting special attention to the world’s most dire situations, the conduct of war, issue of international justice, the foreign policies of the major powers, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between autocracy and democracy.
In 2025, Roth published his book “Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments” (Knopf and Allen Lane) about the strategies used by Human Rights Watch to defend human rights, drawing on his years of experience.
