"In this difficult moment, they seem to argue, human rights must be put on the back burner, a luxury for less trying times," Roth said, introducing the 660-page HRW World Report 2015.
Such a calculation is false, Roth insisted. Instead, he argued that "human rights are an essential compass for political action" and shelving them is "not only wrong, but also shortsighted and counterproductive".
From Iraq to Syria, Egypt, Nigeria and Ukraine, "protecting human rights and enabling people to have a say in how their governments address the crises will be key to their resolution".
The emergence of Isis was in part fuelled by the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and also by the West's failure to address atrocities in Syria, he said.
The Iraq invasion led to a security vacuum and abuses in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay.
Later the US and Britain "largely shut their eyes" to the sectarian policies of Iraq's former Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his persecution of the Sunni minority, and even continued to ply his Government with arms.
In Syria, the US cobbled together a 60-strong coalition to combat Isis jihadis, but no nations have stepped up pressure on President Bashar al-Assad "to stop the slaughter of civilians".
In Beirut, where HRW presented its report, Roth said, "The West is not going to succeed in stopping Isis if it allows Isis to say that it's the only one trying to stop Assad's barrel bombs."
This same selectivity has been shown in Egypt, where the global response to "unprecedented repression" by general-turned-President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, has been "shamefully inadequate".
Washington shied away from denouncing the Egyptian military's overthrow of Mohammed Morsi, the elected Islamist President, a coup.
In this, it was driven by its own concerns for the security of the unruly Sinai peninsula and neighbouring US-ally Israel.
Support for the Sisi leadership is "a disaster for the Egyptian hopes of a democratic future" and sends "an appalling message to the region".
"Isis can now credibly argue that violence is the only path to power for Islamists because when they sought power through fair elections and won, they were ousted with little international protest," Roth said.
Human rights abuses in Russia, which stifled critical voices inside the country over the past two years, and the West's "relatively narrow reaction ... may well have aggravated the Ukrainian crisis."
Yet, the West has also fallen back on "a good-versus-bad mentality" and in its desire to show Ukraine as a victim of Russian aggression has been "reluctant to address Ukrainian abuses".
The need for security in the digital age has also triggered concerns for Human Rights Watch, alarmed by daily data snooping by governments targeting hundreds of millions of people.
"Governments everywhere are expanding their own mass surveillance capacity," argued senior HRW internet researcher Cynthia Wong.
The US and Britain remain the leaders in the field, having "thrown away any notion of proportionality".
Wong said the transatlantic allies "have provided a road map for governments of all political persuasions to build their own systems of mass surveillance".
With few privacy protections built in, she warned, "a truly Orwellian scenario could unfold".
A further HRW concern was the trampling of human rights during mega-sporting events such as the Sochi Winter Olympics, when Moscow cracked down on civil society and journalists.
The fact that only Kazakhstan and China - both with terrible rights records - are in the running for the 2022 Winter Olympics, "should be keeping the IOC up at night", the report says.
It proposed the International Olympics Committee build human rights monitoring into the hosting process in the same way "as they now do to build ski jumps, swimming pools and equestrian facilities on time."
Painful wait over prisoner swap
A deadline for a possible prisoner swap apparently set by Isis holding a Japanese journalist and a Jordanian military pilot passed yesterday with no sign of whether the two men were still alive.
Japanese officials had no progress to report, while the Jordanian government said it would only release an al-Qaeda prisoner from death row if it got proof the airman was alive.
"There is nothing I can tell you," government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters. He reiterated Japan's "strong trust" in the Jordanians to help save the Japanese hostage, freelance journalist Kenji Goto.
Suga said the Government had been in close contact with Goto's wife, Rinko Jogo, who has pleaded for her husband's life.
"I fear that this is the last chance for my husband, and we now have only a few hours left," Jogo said. through the Rory Peck Trust, a London-based organisation.
An audio message said to have been posted online on Thursday by Isis said the pilot, Lieutenant Muath al-Kasaesbeh, would be killed if Sajida al-Rishawi, the al-Qaeda prisoner, was not delivered to the Turkish border by sunset on Thursday, Iraq time.
There was no mention of whether the pilot or Goto would be traded for the woman.
The authenticity of the recording could not be verified independently by the AP.
Mayor: They're porn-obsessed
Young British jihadis are pornography-obsessed inadequates who only turn to radical Islam when they fail to "make it with girls", London Mayor Boris Johnson has claimed.
He said an MI5 probe had found that terrorists who joined Isis were sexually frustrated.
Speaking on a visit to Kurdistan, he called for the terrorist group to be "demystified", and its recruits unmasked as "tortured losers".
He told the Sun: "If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn.
"They are tortured. They will be very badly adjusted in their relations with women, and that is a symptom of their feeling of being failures and that the world is against them," he said.
"They are not making it with girls, and so they turn to other forms of spiritual comfort - which of course is no comfort."
Telegraph Group Ltd / AP / AFP
