NEW YORK, Jan 09 (APP):US human rights organizations have condemned Harvard Kennedy School for denying fellowship to the former head of Human Rights Watch (HRW), a prominent international watchdog body, due to “anti-Israel bias”, according to media reports.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called the refusal of a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the HRW chief for nearly three decades, “profoundly troubling”.
PEN America, which advocates for freedom of expression, said the move “raises serious questions” about one of the US’s leading schools of government.
Roth also received backing from other human rights activists.
Roth, the son of Jewish parents whose father fled from Nazi Germany, oversaw HRW’s historic growth in his tenure and was dubbed by The New York Times as the godfather of human rights.
Roth was also linked to the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the International Coalition to Ban Landmines, of which HRW was a founding member.
But the Kennedy School found support from organizations that have been highly critical of Roth and HRW, particularly over the group’s report two years ago that accused Israel of practicing a form of race-based apartheid in the Palestinian-occupied territories.
The Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy offered Roth a job as a senior fellow shortly after he retired as director of HRW in April after 29 years. But the school’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, vetoed the move, the reports said.
A professor of human rights policy at the Kennedy School, Kathryn Sikkink, told the Nation, a liberal American bi-weekly magazine which broke the story, that Elmendorf said to her that Roth would not be permitted to take up the position because HRW has an “anti-Israel bias” and its former director had written tweets critical of Israel.
Roth said he believes Elmendorf had bowed to pressure from donors who were strong supporters of Israel.
“I falsely assumed that the dean of the Kennedy School values academic freedom. Maybe I’m naive in retrospect, but I assume that criticism of Israel, as criticism of any other government, is just par for the course. That’s what a leading foreign policy center does,” Roth said.
Meanwhile, having been denied the fellowship offered by Harvard, Roth accepted a visiting fellowship position at the University of Pennsylvania, according to the reports.
The director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, urged the Kennedy School “to reverse its decision”.
“If Harvard’s decision was based on HRW’s advocacy under Ken’s leadership, this is profoundly troubling – from both a human rights and an academic freedom standpoint,” he said. “Scholars and fellows have to be judged on their merits, not whether they please powerful political interests.”
“It is the role of a human rights defender to call out governments harshly, to take positions that are unpopular in certain quarters and to antagonize those who hold power and authority,” the group said. “There is no suggestion that Roth’s criticisms of Israel are in any way based on racial or religious animus.”
More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East al-Quds, which are all illegal under international law.
Israeli forces have recently been conducting overnight raids and killings in the northern occupied West Bank, mainly in the cities of Jenin and Nablus, where new groups of Palestinian resistance fighters have been formed.
Over the past year, Israeli forces killed at least 200 Palestinians, including 47 children, in the West Bank, occupied East al-Quds, and the Gaza Strip.
According to the United Nations, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank last year was the highest it had been in 16 years.
Local and international rights groups have condemned Israel’s excessive use of force and “shoot-to-kill policy” against Palestinians.
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