Ken Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, was recently in Montreal where he delivered a speech entitled “Reestablishing Canada’s Leadership in Global Human Rights” to the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations.
Video of the speech is available on the CPAC Website and will be broadcast on CPAC this coming Saturday, November 14th at 12:00 noon and repeated on Tuesday, November 17the at 11 am.
Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch was profiled in the October issue of Vanity Fair Magazine. Selected by actor Brad Pitt to the magazine’s “Hall of Fame,” Roth is described as someone whose name “sends a chill down the spine of human-rights abusers…”
Before joining HRW as deputy director in 1987, Mr. Roth was a federal prosecutor for both the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington.
Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, for Human Rights Watch, responded today to an opinion piece (subscription only) by Ken Frankel in The Globe & Mail, regarding the free-trade deal negotiated by the Harper government with Colombia.
Text of the letter follows:
No trade deal for Colombia
KENNETH ROTH, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch
January 9, 2008
New York — Ken Frankel (A Trade Deal Is Good For Colombian Human Rights – Jan. 8) is mistaken that a free-trade agreement would improve Colombia’s human-rights situation. Colombia’s human-rights scenario is so serious that an agreement might even make things worse.
For years, Colombia has had the highest rate of killings of trade unionists in the world. More than 400 trade unionists have been killed during the government of President Alvaro Uribe, fewer than 3 per cent of cases have been solved.
Meanwhile, the Uribe administration is embroiled in a scandal over links involving high-ranking officials and congressmen from his coalition with paramilitary death squads responsible for many of the killings. Rather than support investigations, Mr. Uribe has lashed out against judges and journalists trying to break the paramilitaries’ influence.
If Canada really wants to help Colombia, it should follow Congress’s example by using free trade as leverage and telling Colombia’s government that, if it wants a free-trade agreement, it must first clean up its act on human rights.
