Former Head of HRW denied prestigious Fellowship for criticising Israel

Ken Roth, who ran Human Rights Watch for 29 years, was denied a Fellowship at the Kennedy School over his criticism of Israel, American bi-weekly magazine, The Nation, revealed yesterday.

Roth, who oversaw HRW during the publication of its report accusing Israel of committing the crime of Apartheid, stepped down last year. After announcing his decision, he was contacted by Sushma Raman, the Executive Director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Raman asked Roth if he would be interested in joining the Centre as a senior Fellow.

According to details revealed by The Nation, Roth said he was, indeed, interested in becoming a Fellow. Both he and Rahman exchanged emails and put in place an agreement, in principle, to join the Centre. The proposal was sent to the office of Dean for approval in what was assumed to be a formality. Two weeks later, however, the Carr Centre was informed that Roth’s Fellowship would not be approved.

Nothing like this had ever happened, according to Kathryn Sikkink, the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School who had been affiliated with the Carr Centre for nine years. Sikkink was told that the reason Roth was rejected for the position was because of his views on Israel. Human Rights Watch, she was told, has an “anti-Israel bias”.

Details of an email Sikkink sent to the Dean objecting to the decision were revealed by The Nation. In her own research, Sikkink said that she used HRW’s reports “all the time”, and while the organisation had, indeed, been critical of Israel, it had also been critical of China, Saudi Arabia—even the United States. Sikkink included that point in the detailed e-mail she prepared for the Dean, seeking to rebut the charge of anti-Israel bias.

Sikkink drew on the Political Terror Scale, a yearly measure of state repression compiled by a team based at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, to defend HRW’s position on Israel. It ranks countries on a 1-to-5 scale of least to most repressive, based on the incidence of political imprisonment, summary executions, torture and the like. Countries are code-based on the annual human rights reports of the US State Department, Amnesty International-which has also labelled Israel an apartheid state – and HRW.

Every year, Israel and the Occupied Territories scored a 3 or 4, putting it in a class with Angola, Colombia, Turkiye and Zimbabwe—a “very bad record”, Sikkink is reported saying. She further compared HRW’s assessment to that of both Amnesty and the State Department and found the three to be “pretty similar”. In short, Sikkink says, the data showed that “Human Rights Watch does not have a bias at all against Israel” and that to conclude otherwise “is misinformation”.

The Dean answered that he had read her e-mail but would not reconsider his decision.

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