PARIS — Human Rights Watch (HRW) Executive
Director Kenneth Roth said Tuesday he was stepping down after three-decades in
which the New York-based NGO became a thorn in the side of authoritarian
regimes and rights abusers globally.
اضافة اعلان
Roth, who has led the organization since 1993, will
leave at the end of August, HRW said in a statement.
“Nothing can last forever,” he said in a video
message. “It is time to pass the baton.”
He expressed “great confidence” that his colleagues
would continue to effectively defend human rights.
“While I am leaving Human Rights Watch, I am not
leaving our cause,” he said.
Under his leadership, HRW has grown from a
small-scale campaign group into a global rights organization that now employs
over 500 staff across the globe.
In 1997, it shared a Nobel Peace Prize for its
efforts to ban antipersonnel landmines and played a critical role in
establishing the International Criminal Court.
Evidence gathered by its staff during conflicts
around the world helped ensure the convictions at international tribunals of
figures including former Liberian leader Charles Taylor over the war in Sierra
Leone and wartime Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.
“Today, amid the horrific abuse taking place in
Ukraine, an infrastructure is in place to hold perpetrators accountable,” the
group said in a statement.
In comments to AFP, Roth said that while Russia’s
invasion of its neighbor was devastating, “my biggest fear by far is China.”
“China is economically powerful and is determined to
undermine the global human rights system. For Xi Jinping, the only way to hang
on to power is to be profoundly repressive and to actively weaken the
international human rights system,” he said.
His stances occasionally drew controversy, and HRW
acknowledged in its statement that “Roth inevitably earned many enemies.”
In April 2021, HRW became the first major
international rights group to accuse Israel of using policies of apartheid —
the segregation of black people and whites in white-ruled South Africa —
against Palestinians.
Israel vehemently denied the allegation and
denounced HRW’s report. But in February this year a similar allegation was made
by HRW’s London-based counterparts at Amnesty International.
“Despite being Jewish — and having a father who fled
Nazi Germany as a 12-year-old boy — he has been attacked for the organization’s
criticism of Israeli government abuses,” HRW said.
In recent years, Roth had also become a bitter enemy
of the Chinese authorities after repeatedly singling out Beijing over its
rights violations.
China imposed sanctions against Roth personally and
expelled him from Hong Kong when he travelled there to release HRW’s annual
World Report in January 2020, “which spotlighted Beijing’s threat to the global
human rights system”, the organization said.
A search for a successor is now underway, it added.
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