The director of Human Rights Watch says refugees escaping violence in the Middle East are in danger of being “scapegoated” after 129 people were killed by attackers in Paris last week.

Ken Roth, who was in Toronto on Monday for a fundraising dinner, told the Star that the bigger problem is the lack of “social inclusion” that many immigrant communities experience in European countries.

“There’s a tendency right now to blame the refugees, because apparently one of the participants in the attacks had entered Europe with the migrant flow,” Roth said, pointing to reports that one of the Paris attackers entered Europe as a refugee in Greece.

“Europe shouldn’t allow the fear of the refugee flow to overshadow the genuine problem that it has with social inclusion, and making sure that members of prior immigrant communities feel that they have a real place within European society.”

Roth has been the executive director of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based non-governmental organization that’s active in more than 80 countries, since 1993. In a wide-ranging conversation with the Star, Roth also discussed ways the human-rights community can aim to dampen support for the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), which controls swaths of Iraq and Syria and has claimed responsibility for attacks in Paris and Beirut last week.

“Many people are frustrated with ISIS because they seem to be beyond shaming. They publicize their atrocities. In a traditional sense, the traditional shaming methodology of the human-rights movement doesn’t work,” Roth said. “But we shouldn’t look at things in such a narrow way, because even ISIS depends on recruits and external support, and in those audiences shaming is possible.”

Roth said the human rights movement can work to exposing and condemning practices within the area controlled by ISIS, such as the sexual enslavement of non-Muslim women. In that way, he argued, it may be possible to detract or discourage supporters of the ISIS movement. “The more people know, the less attractive it is,” he said.

Commenting on reports that the Paris attacks originated amongst a group of people who were residents of Belgium and France, Roth also cautioned against any impulse to ramp up mass surveillance of citizens or hastily deport dual citizens without proper evidence of wrongdoing.

“Whenever there’s a major terrorist attack in the West there’s a danger we could overreact,” he said, criticizing the suspension of some civil liberties that occurred in the United States after 9/11. “There’s a real danger of ignoring basic rights at home as a way of making us more secure.”

Roth pointed to continuing wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen as areas facing significant human-rights issues. He added that Burundi, in central Africa, is facing instability reminiscent of the lead-up to the Rwandan genocide, and warned that peacekeepers may be needed as protesters continue to denounce the efforts of President Pierre Nkurunziza to stay in power by changing the constitution.

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