Despots Masquerading as Democrats: Why are they doing so, and why are we letting them

6.00pm Thursday 13 March
Tickets: $20/$15 Concession
Bookings: Seymour Box Office 02 9351 7940

The established democracies are accepting flawed and unfair elections for political expediency. By allowing autocrats to pose as democrats, without demanding they uphold the civil and political rights that make democracy meaningful, the United States, the European Union and other influential democracies risk undermining human rights worldwide.

The techniques used by such autocrats to tame the nettlesome unpredictability of democracy are nothing if not creative. The challenge they face is to appear to embrace democratic principles while avoiding any risk of succumbing to popular preferences. Electoral fraud, political violence, press censorship, repression of civil society, even military rule have all been used to curtail the prospect that the proclaimed process of democratization might actually lead to a popular say in government.

If dictators can get away with calling themselves "democrats," they will have acquired a powerful tool for deflecting pressure to uphold human rights. It is time to stop selling democracy on the cheap and to start substituting a broader and more meaningful vision of the concept that incorporates all human rights.

Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization dedicated to protecting the human rights of people worldwide. Its researchers conduct fact-finding missions to investigate and expose human rights violations around the globe, which result in in-depth reports that hold perpetrators of abuse accountable

Ken Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch. He has held this post since 1993, serving previously as the deputy director for six years. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 1987, Mr. Roth was a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington. He also worked in private practice as a litigator.

Mr. Roth has conducted human rights investigations around the globe, devoting special attention to issues of justice and accountability for gross abuses of human rights, standards governing military conduct in times of war, the human rights policies of the United States and the United Nations, and the human rights responsibilities of multinational businesses. He has written extensively on a range of human rights topics in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Nation, and the New York Review of Books. He appears often in the major media, including NPR, the BBC, CNN, PBS, and the principal U.S. networks. He has testified repeatedly before the U.S. Congress as well as before the French Parliament and the United Nations.

A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Mr. Roth was drawn to the human rights cause in part by his father's experience fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938. He began working on human rights after the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981, and soon also became deeply engaged in fighting military repression in Haiti. In his fifteen years as executive director of Human Rights Watch, the organization has more than tripled in size.