Why the Godfather of Human Rights Is Not Welcome at Harvard | The Nation |

Kenneth Roth, who ran Human Rights Watch for 29 years, was denied a fellowship at the Kennedy School. The reason? Israel.

Sikkink included that point in a detailed e-mail she prepared for the dean seeking to rebut the charge of anti-Israel bias. She drew on the Political Terror Scale, a yearly measure of state repression compiled by a team based at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. It ranks countries on a 1-to-5 scale of least to most repressive, based on the incidence of political imprisonment, summary executions, torture, and the like. The team codes each country's record based on the annual human rights reports of the US State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

Every year, Israel and the Occupied Territories scored a 3 or 4, putting it in a class with Angola, Colombia, Turkey, and Zimbabwe--a "very bad record," Sikkink says. She further compared HRW's assessment to that of both Amnesty and the State Department and found the three to be "pretty similar." In short, Sikkink says, the data showed that "Human Rights Watch does not have a bias at all against Israel" and that to conclude otherwise "is misinformation." She sent her findings to Elmendorf; the dean answered that he had read her e-mail but would not reconsider his decision.

• Vision on Humanity - Country Ranking 2022
• Dean Kennedy School @Harvard: Douglas Elmendorf