The End of Human Rights?

THERE IS NO DOUBT that the human rights movement is facing the greatest test it has confronted since its emergence in the 1970s as a major participant in the international order.

A bellwether of this crisis has been the essays that Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, has written introducing his organization’s annual reports. One has to go back to 2014 to find Roth writing in a relatively sanguine way about the future of human rights across the globe. That year’s report is couched in the positive terms of its title: “Stopping Mass Atrocities, Majority Bullying, and Abusive Counterterrorism.” By 2016, he was musing on “how the politics of fear and the crushing of civil society imperil global rights.” And the following year, Roth warned Human Rights Watch’s supporters that the rise of populism “threatens to reverse the accomplishments of the modern human rights movement.”

And though in the 2018 report Roth claims that things may not be as bad as they have been for the previous three years, he leaves no doubt that they