Background
Kenneth Roth, a graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, was drawn to human rights causes through his Jewish father's experience of fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938. 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. As they grew older, he 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.
Prior to starting at 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 to be plagued by brutal military rule. Since then, Roth has traveled the world over, pressing government officials of all stripes to pay greater respect to human rights.
His biography on the HRW website states 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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