Books for Universal Human Rights Month

A landmark ethnography of human smuggling that dismantles stereotypes through seven years of immersive fieldwork, offering a compassionate, incisive account of a hidden global economy.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The master of the legal thriller” (Associated Press) teams up with “the godfather of the innocence movement” (Texas Monthly) to share ten harrowing true stories of wrongful convictions.“Each of these stories is told with astonishing power.”—David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon“Gripping . . . compelling . . . What makes [Framed] important reading isn’t the shock value advertised in the title. It’s the exposure of the infuriating, recurrent factors involved in so many unrighteous convictions.”—The Washington PostJohn Grisham is known worldwide for his bestselling novels, but it’s his real-life passion for justice that led to his work with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, the first organization dedicated to exonerating innocent people who have been wrongly convicted. Together they offer an inside look at the many injustices in our criminal justice system.A fundamental principle of our legal system is a presumption of innocence, but once someone has been found guilty, there is very little room to prove doubt. These ten true stories shed light on Americans who were innocent but found guilty and forced to sacrifice friends, families, and decades of their lives to prison while the guilty parties remained free. In each of the stories, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey recount the dramatic hard-fought battles for exoneration. They take a close look at what leads to wrongful convictions in the first place and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and corruption in the court system that can make them so hard to reverse.Impeccably researched and told with page-turning suspense as only John Grisham can deliver, Framed is the story of winning freedom when the battle already seems lost and the deck is stacked against you.Look for John Grisham’s forthcoming legal thriller, The Widow. This time, the verdict isn’t the end of the story.

Now a global bestseller, the remarkable life of Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan peasant woman, reflects on the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America. Menchú suffered gross injustice and hardship in her early life: her brother, father and mother were murdered by the Guatemalan military.

In March 2022, Elena Kostyuchenko became one of an exceedingly small number of free-press Russian journalists to cross into Ukraine. Knowing that if she ever returned home, she would likely be sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison, yet she filed her stories despite the grave threat that it posed to her personal safety.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • WINNER OF THE 2025 ZÓCALO BOOK PRIZEA humanitarian leader with more than two decades of experience working for the United Nations takes aim at the global food crisis—revealing how hunger anywhere affects lives everywhere and what steps we can take to change course. "This book should be required reading for the entire human race." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of We Are the Weather

Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction • A profound act of witness and a tour de force of literary journalism, Some People Need Killing documents killings carried out in the Phillipines by police and vigilantes in the name of then president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.

In this signature yearly report, Human Rights Watch will document and address human rights abuses in more than 100 countries, plus a keynote essay by executive director Tirana Hassan.