The Age of Impunity: How Autocrats Win When Democracies Falter

Kenneth Roth warns: human rights are under siege. From Trump’s embrace of dictators to China’s war on truth, silence isn’t neutrality, it’s complicity.

On a damp Monday evening in London, a room filled with journalists, advocates, and the morally curious leaned in to listen. The topic was human rights—a subject that should be universally embraced but is increasingly subject to political convenience and brutal suppression. At the heart of the conversation sat Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, a man who has spent decades in the trenches of global justice.

The setting was an event hosted by Tortoise Media, a newsroom that prides itself on slow, considered journalism. The format was intimate, almost conspiratorial. A discussion rather than a lecture. A place for tough questions. And as Roth took his seat, the weight of the topics at hand, Trump, Ukraine, Gaza, China, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom, settled into the air like an unshakable fog.

The Power and Peril of Shaming

The conversation opened with an intriguing assertion. The fight for human rights, Roth argued, is not a matter of moral persuasion but of…