In most countries governed by the rule of law, a strong, independent judicial branch makes for the most effective enforcement of human rights.

But it’s all too easy for judges to be corrupted, compromised, or even murdered.

What then?

“Deploying the public’s sense of right and wrong to pressure the political branches of government to respect rights can be remarkably effective,” Ken Roth answers.

Roth, the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor and a visiting lecturer at Princeton SPIA, would know. In the three decades he spent as the director of Human Rights Watch, he guided the organization “to increase the price of oppression, to shift a government’s cost-benefit calculation so that abuse no longer seems as desirable,” he says.

In his new book, “Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments” (Knopf), Roth “pulls back the curtain to show the strategies that we used, both what worked and what did not.”

Roth wrote the book to demystify how Human Rights Watch worked to achieve concrete results, so that people are inspired to actively engage in similar work.

“Some people support human rights in the abstract but doubt that much can be done to guarantee them,” he says. “They think of human-rights activists as well-intentioned but ineffectual. I have found that when people understand the tactics we used to push back against abusive governments, they are encouraged to join the effort.

“Knowing that real change is possible, that the perennial skeptics are wrong, encourages people to help make that change happen.”

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Excerpt: “Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments”

Human-rights defenders like to point out that none of our rights are secure if the rights of anyone are being violated. But a disturbing number of Western politicians do not accept that syllogism. By portraying segments of society as threats to the community rather than members of it, autocrats seek to justify depriving them of their rights, assuming that mistreating these supposed outsiders will not affect the rights of people still deemed on the inside—indeed, that it is necessary to protect them.

In part this reflects a more materially advanced Western world, in which people are less concerned about obtaining the physical necessities of life and so give greater priority to cultural or identity issues that often lie behind these claimed threats. In part it reflects the attributes of the modern era — the greater mobility, the faster pace of change, the parallel social isolation — which can be disconcerting, leaving people open to messages that their community is endangered. In part it reflects a growing sense by some people that they are being left behind, that opportunities for a better life have become constricted, that members of the governing elite are ignoring them, that they are regarded with contempt rather than the respect they seek and deserve.

People who feel snubbed by democracy are ripe for the autocrat’s appeal. Ironically, this trend is abetted by the identity politics that has come to dominate much progressive thought, because that, too, prioritizes differences in securing respect for rights over membership in a community.

To defend democracy, we must address this threat at its core. It is not enough to speak about the importance of rights. We must also repair the social fabric on which rights depend. To regard even unpopular minorities as worthy of rights requires countering the autocrats’ politics of fear to promote recognition that we are all members of a national or political community. It requires progressives, too, to affirm a national community even as they defend parts of that community whose rights are neglected or suppressed.

That requires fighting demonization of unpopular minorities by reaffirming a common humanity. It requires critiquing the autocrats’ self-serving sleights-of-hand, such as their creation of enemies and their rhetoric of hate as substitutes for practical programs of governance or positive visions for the future. It requires elaborating what returning to supposed traditional values would mean for the vast majority who do not sit atop the social hierarchy that is being eulogized. And it requires reminding people of the dangers to everyone from the tyranny of an asserted majority, not by demonizing that majority, but by stressing a commonality of fundamental interest in all of our rights.

In short, the defense of democracy is a project of community. Unless we can rebuild a nationwide sense of community – a sense that certain core rights are beyond challenge even as we inevitably differ on particular political programs – it will be too easy for aspiring autocrats to shred the foundational fabric upon which any democracy must be built.