Neil Hicks

Neil Hicks has been a human rights practitioner with leading international and regional human rights organizations for over 40 years, beginning with Amnesty International in London in 1985 and then in New York with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights/Human Rights First. Since 2018 he has been the Senior Director for Advocacy of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies based in Tunis and latterly in Brussels. He has researched and written extensively on human rights issues in the Middle East and North Africa for these organizations, as well as publishing academic papers, book chapters, newspaper opinion pieces and online commentary. He was the founding director of Human Rights First’s Human Rights Defenders Program and co- founded the Human Rights Defenders Policy Forum with The Carter Center in Atlanta. He served on the jury of the Martin Ennals Human Rights Award for Human Rights Defenders for several years. In 2000-2001 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington D.C., where he conducted research on the development of the human rights movements in Egypt and Turkey. In recent years, he has focused on human rights and counter-terrorism, serving as a member of the Steering Group of the CSO Coalition on Human Rights and Counterterrorism. He is a graduate of Durham University School of Oriental Studies. He studied intensive Arabic at the American University in Cairo and international refugee law at the University of Oxford Refugee Studies Centre. He has taught courses on human rights in in the Middle East at Fordham Law School in New York City. While visiting the Institute his research will focus on the current crisis in human rights implementation, reflecting particularly on the experiences of local, regional and international practitioners working on promoting and protecting human rights in the Middle East and North Africa.