But Human Rights Watch was not pacifist. The outfit remained neutral not merely on who was in the right during a war but on whether a war was justified before it broke out. Neier’s successor, the current Human Rights Watch leader, Kenneth Roth, later reflected, “We weren’t against war per se. We never took up the issue of who is the aggressor, who is the defender, who was at fault for starting the war, who’s in the right, who’s in the wrong. We always did stay neutral on those issues.”
