Organizer: The Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, the Human Rights Institute, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University

Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY

Description:

Are human rights movements able to rise to the challenge of the urgent issues of our time, from authoritarianism and right-wing populism to economic inequality, impunity for mass atrocities, and the climate crisis? What have human rights norms and strategies accomplished? Should traditional fact-finding and name-and-shame strategies be defended, or transformed? And what can the language and tools of human rights offer us now, at this incredibly difficult moment, around the world and here in the United States?

On the launch of Righting Wrongs, a sweeping new book by Kenneth Roth about his three decades at the helm of Human Rights Watch, join us to debate the past, future, and meanings of human rights. Prof. Sheila Coronel, Director, Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, will moderate, with introductory remarks by Prof. Sarah Knuckey, Co-Director, Human Rights Institute.

About the Speakers:

Kenneth Roth is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Until August 2022, he served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations. He built the organization into a global institution operating in some 100 countries, with 550 staff members and an annual budget of $100 million. Before that, 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, the foreign policies of the major powers, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between autocracy and democracy.

Roth’s first book, Righting Wrongs, was recently published by Knopf on February 25. It offers an insider’s view of the strategies used by Human Rights Watch to put pressure on governments to respect human rights, drawing on his years of experience. Debunking the skeptics, it demonstrates with repeated examples how pressure can move even the most powerful and recalcitrant governments.

Sheila Coronel is the Toni Stabile Professor of Professional Practice in Investigative Journalism and the Director of the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. Coronel began reporting in the Philippines during the twilight of the Marcos dictatorship, when she wrote for the underground opposition press and later for mainstream magazines and newspapers. As Marcos lost power and press restrictions eased, she reported on human rights abuses, the growing democratic movement and the election of Corazon Aquino as president. In 1989, Coronel and her colleagues founded the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Under Coronel's leadership, the Center became the leading investigative reporting institution in the Philippines and Asia. In 2001, the Center’s reporting led to the fall of President Joseph Estrada. In 2003, Coronel won Asia’s premier prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

Coronel has written and edited more than a dozen books on the Philippines, freedom of information and investigative journalism. She has trained journalists around the world and written investigative reporting textbooks for journalists in Southeast Asia and the Balkan region. She speaks frequently at international investigative reporting conferences and writes about global investigative journalism. Coronel joined the faculty of the Journalism School in 2006, when she was named director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. In 2011, she received one of Columbia University’s highest honors, the Presidential Teaching Award.

Her recent work is on the populist Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and police abuses in the war on drugs.

Sarah Knuckey joined Columbia Law School in July 2014 as faculty co-director of the Human Rights Institute, director of the Human Rights Clinic, and the Lieff Cabraser Clinical Professor of Law. Knuckey is an international human rights lawyer, professor, and special adviser to the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. She has carried out factfinding investigations and reported on human rights and armed conflict violations around the world, including in Afghanistan, Brazil, the Central African Republic, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, and the United States.

Knuckey’s work has addressed issues such as unlawful killings, armed conflict, sexual violence, corporate accountability, extractive industries, and protest rights. Her academic research interests include human rights methodologies, critical perspectives on human rights, new weapons technologies, transparency norms, and post-traumatic stress disorder and resilience.

Knuckey is a founding editor of Just Security, an online forum for analysis of U.S. national security law and policy. She has been awarded the Fulbright Postgraduate Award, the Murphy Postgraduate Scholarship, the Harvard Human Rights Program Fellowship, the Parsons Memorial Prize for Law, and the KCF Keall Prize in Law.

Registration Link:

To attend the event in person, please register here.