Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth stepped down at the end of August after nearly 30 years in the job.

Mr Roth has led the organisation since 1993, transforming it from a small group of regional ‘watch committees’ into a major international human rights organisation with global influence.

In farewelling the organisation, Mr Roth reflected, in a series of online interviews, on his years championing human rights and taking on repressive governments and intransigent United Nations officials.

He said became interested in human rights because his father fled Nazi Germany as a 17-year-old.

“I grew up with Hitler stories so it sparked my interest in human rights,” he said.

Mr Roth attended Yale Law School and the worked as a federal prosecutor while volunteering at night and weekends as a human rights lawyer.

“When a job opened up at Human Rights Watch, I jumped at it,” he said.

Reflecting on his work watching the United Nations influence on human rights, he said the UN’s most powerful body, the Security Council, had undergone several transformations.

“During Cold War, there was complete stalemate but when it ended there was a time when it worked and there were agreements that saw peacekeepers sent to Bosnia or war criminals referred to the international criminal court. It was important moment that showed how things could work,” Mr Roth said.

“But since then, things have reverted to a Cold War mentality with the major powers using their vetos to stop things happening – even to continue humanitarian assistance in oppositions controlled parts of Syria, let alone major problems like Myanmar or the situation in Ukraine,” he said.

Mr Roth said key successive key UN personnel had been influential in shaping the organisation.

“Some UN Secretary Generals have been more effective than others. For instance, Boutros Ghali referred to Putin’s bombing of civilians in Chechnya as “an internal affair” for Russia.

“Kofi Annan was outspoken and became a friend of human rights and Ban Ki Moon started slowly but eventually became a human rights champion, especially on LGBT rights.

“But the incumbent Guterres seems to go out of his way to avoid serious criticism of anyone powerful,” Mr Roth said.

Reflecting on Hong Kong and China, Mr Roth said China was currently undergoing the most intense period of repression since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

“Xi Jinping likes to pretend that the Chinese people have made this willing trade off that for economic growth they will accept an authoritarian government,” he said.

“There is a question around how much credit the Chinese government deserves for the economic growth. They were responsible for the economic disaster that were the ‘great leap forward’ and the Cultural Revolution.

“What happed was that the government got out of the way and the innovation and energy of the Chinese people resulted in remarkable growth.

“So the question is: are the Chinese people willing to give up basic freedom and any say in how the economy is divided up and are they willing to give up any political voice?

“And the answer was Hong Kong because obviously people throughout most of China have no capacity to protest, not capacity to vote or demonstrate.

“The one part of China controlled by Beijing where there was a degree of freedom was Hong Kong. And the people of Hong Kong made it absolutely clear that the last thing they wanted was the Communist party dictatorship.

“They wanted democracy, they wanted human rights. And they showed that with millions of people taking to the streets and the end result was intolerable for Xi Jinping. He could not allow this demonstrated falseness of his claims to prevail.

“So he imposed the so-called national security law, which is a misnomer because it is not about national security, it’s about Communist Party security,” Mr Roth said.

He said and pro-democracy activists or and critics of the government are “either in prison, or in exile or silenced”.

“It’s horrible situation. Hong Kong was such as wonderful city and now the essence of Hong Kong is gone,” Mr Roth said.

“And when you look across China more broadly, we are going through the most intense period of repression since the murderous crackdown in the 1989 pre-democracy Tiananmen Square movement,” he said.

Mr Roth said that in China in the early 2000s there was an optimism around human rights in China but that has been swept away.

He said there was a “convenient theory” in the international community that countries could trade with China because it would create a middle class “who would demand its right and would demand democracy”.

“That turned out not to be true. The trade did create a middle class but it also gave the government the means to crackdown,” Mr Roth said.

“It has creative a massive surveillance society and it has timed social media through massive human resources and through various types of AI,” he said.

But almost counter-intuitively Mr Roth said the Chinese government is increasingly vulnerable to international pressure.

“Xi Jinping is clearly afraid of the Chinese people. If he were not, he would allow them to speak to each other, he would allow them to debate and to have a free voice.

“He’s terrified of all of that for fear that what’s going to come out is what happened in Hong Kong. Here’s a dictator who is running scared who is trying to keep a lid on things and that is not a long-term sustainable strategy,” he said.

Mr Roth also reflected on the human rights struggle in Afghanistan over four decades.

He said his first memory of human rights work in relation to Afghanistan was a humanitarian worker coming to New York demanding weapons be given to Mujahedeen fighters battling the Russians.

“My earliest memory was a humanitarian worker coming to New York pleading for the Mujahedeen to be given stinger missiles to shoot down soviet jets,” he said.

“Ultimately this worked militarily but there was nothing about human rights, democracy of justice.

“This was a force that stood for the opposite of human rights and continued Afghanistan down this trajectory,” Mr Roth said.

But he said the current problems faced by Afghanistan stemmed from this troubled history but there had been some changes along the way.

Mr Roth how the international community should engage with the Taliban was a difficult question.

“It’s a different Afghanistan from 20 years ago when the Taliban were ousted. There has been the emergence of civil society independent journalism and women in school and in professional lives,” he said.

“Elements of the Taliban would like to put all that back in the bottle but it’s difficult to do. There is now very significant domestic pressure to retain these very basic rights. That is primarily what the international community should think about in negotiating with the Taliban.

“And when the Taliban resumed power they seemed conscious of this. They said they would protect the Hazara minority and not end girls being able to go to school –a promise that was not kept. But at least they felt the need to say that,” he said.

Mr Roth said the current humanitarian crisis was the result of the US freezing the assets of the central bank, which has cause a cash and liquidity crisis.

“The US has been trying to find a way of getting cash into Afghanistan without being seen to be funding the Taliban,” he said.

“This the dilemma we face right now. Nobody wants to fund the Taliban’s repression but an educated girl doesn’t do any good if she is starving.”

Mr Roth said the US had lost its reputation as a bastion of human rights with its “cynical, lawless approach to the 9-11 attacks.

And he says it hasn’t recovered its reputation.

“After 9-11 it was difficult to imagine how awful the US Government could be. And how much the Bush administration rewrote the rules and come up with awful rationale for torture, disappearances and endless detention,” Mr Roth said.

He said that among the gains in human rights in the US have been LBGT rights.

But the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs Wade which restricted women’s rights to abortion in the US was “a setback”, Mr Roth said.

Another gain has been a reduction in the incarceration of black men in America.

“We have got rid of some of the tools used to put so many black men in jail.” Mr Roth said.

He said immigration had always been problematic area for human rights in the US.

“There has always been a temptation for US governments to ignore the rights of asylum seekers,” Mr Roth said.

“Trump used health public health measures during the pandemic to push people back to Mexico where they are vulnerable to criminal gangs and Biden has largely continued the practice.”

Mr Roth said free speech was another area in need of human rights protection – but ironically at times because of cancel culture driven by progressives.

“Harmful speech that actually causes harm needs to be suppressed, but I’m worried about progressives saying ‘this make me uncomfortable suppress it’.

“So many leaders around the world are censoring speech so we need to be careful,” Mr Roth said.

Human Rights Watch’s acting Executive Director is Tirana Hassan, a founding member of Australia’s refugee legal service.