Human Rights in the 2020s - A conversation with Ken Roth and Helen Clark
| Date: | Thursday 26 Feb, 12:30pm - 2pm |
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| Location: | AUT City Campus WA Building, WA224 Auckland New Zealand |
Join us as former global Human Rights Watch Executive Director Ken Roth and former New Zealand Prime Minister Rt Hon Helen Clark examine the increasingly complex landscape of human rights in the 2020s.
Moderated by AUT Vice-Chancellor Professor Damon Salesa, the discussion will consider the many challenges to human rights arising from conflicts around the world, and the broader systemic issues facing the international community. The speakers will explore how a shifting global order is affecting traditional human rights safeguards, and what new strategies are needed in an era of fractured cooperation and weakened institutions.
About the speakers
The Right Honourable Helen Clark
Helen was Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008. During her nine years as Prime Minister, New Zealand enjoyed strong economic growth, low unemployment and significant investment in public services. Her government set clear objectives for sustainable development and climate action.
Helen became the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme in April 2009 and the Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the heads of all UN funds, programmes and departments working on development issues. She was the first woman to assume these positions, which she held for a full two terms and eight years before standing down in April 2017.
She has been the patron of the Helen Clark Foundation, a non-partisan public policy think tank hosted by AUT, since 2019.
Kenneth Roth
Kenneth Roth is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He is also a Guardian US columnist.
Until August 2022, he served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch, which he built into a global institution operating in some 100 countries. He has conducted numerous human rights investigative and advocacy missions around the world, meeting with dozens of heads of state and countless ministers, is quoted widely in the media, and has written hundreds of articles on a wide range of human rights issues, devoting special attention to the world’s most dire situations, the conduct of war, the foreign policies of the major powers, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between autocracy and democracy.
His first book, 'Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments,' offers an insider’s view of the strategies developed by Human Rights Watch to put pressure on governments to respect human rights.