Neil Hicks
Director, Human Rights Defenders Program
Joined the Lawyers Committee in 1991

Neil Hicks directs the Lawyers Committee’s Human Rights Defender program, which assists human rights advocates - lawyers, judges and other activists - who have come under attack for defending human rights. Neil supervises defender campaigns that include overseas missions, diplomatic advocacy, public education, and grassroots lobbying. Neil also created and runs our new Middle East Initiative, a project to assist local human rights defenders in the closed societies of the region. Neil is an expert on the Middle East and an Arabic speaker with extensive contacts in the region

Before joining the Lawyers Committee, Neil worked as a researcher for the Middle East Department of Amnesty International in London, where he worked between 1985 and 1991. He has also served as human rights project officer of Birzeit University in the West Bank.

In 2000-2001, Neil took a year-long sabbatical from the Lawyers Committee; he spent his leave as a Senior Fellow in the Jennings Randolph Fellowship Program of the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., where he wrote the forthcoming book, The Crisis of Human Rights Implementation in the Middle East. Neil is the author of many reports and scholarly articles, most recently, Human Rights in Turkey, Some Legal Aspects in Human Rights Review (January 2002) and Does Islamic Human Rights Activism Provide a Remedy to the Crisis of Human Rights Implementation in the Middle East? in Human Rights Quarterly, May 2002.

Neil holds a B.A. (Hons.) in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St. Cuthbert’s Society, University of Durham (1983) and a certificate from the Arabic Language Unit of the American University in Cairo (1982). He studied international refugee law at the Refugee Studies Program, Oxford University (1991). Neil has taught Human Rights in the Middle East at Fordham Law School.