Michael Posner

Michael H. Posner (born November 19, 1950) is an American lawyer, the Founding Executive Director and later the President of Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), the former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) of the United States, currently director for the Center of Business and Human Rights at NYU Stern School of Business, as well as Professor of Business and Society at New York University Stern School of Business, and a board member of the International Service for Human Rights.

Posner writes a regular column for Forbes, where he covers leadership strategy and human rights, primarily focusing on the protection and promotion of human rights in the business community.

His columns have addressed global consulting firm McKinsey & Company's relationship with authoritarian regimes; data-analysis company Palantir Technologies' relationship with state security services like U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement; Amazon's responsibility to protect its workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic; Facebook's responsibility for curbing hate speech and disinformation in order to ensure election integrity; and themes such as racial and gender diversity in leadership, combating short-termism and democracy promotion.

Posner was born in Chicago, Illinois.

He received a B.A. from the University of Michigan.

He received his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall).

After graduating, Posner spent a year documenting atrocities committed in Uganda.

His work in Geneva with the United Nations and International Commission of Jurists earned him esteem as a human-rights advocate.

In 1978, Posner was recruited by Jerome Shestack and James Silkenat to become the founding executive director of the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, a non-profit, nonpartisan international human rights organization with offices in New York and Washington, D.C. that works on a range of domestic and international human rights issues.

He focused on refugee protection, advancing a rights-based approach to national security and combating discrimination.

Posner lectured at Yale Law School from 1981 to 1984, and again in 2009, and at Columbia Law School between 1984 and 2008.

He is the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, in addition to serving as director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at the school.

He has also taught at the NYU School of Law.

He proposed, drafted, and campaigned for the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), which was adopted by Congress and signed into law in 1992.

Also in 1992, Posner helped musician/activist Peter Gabriel found WITNESS, an organization that uses video and online technologies to shed light on human rights violations around the world.

In its first few years, WITNESS was based at Human Rights First.

WITNESS has since received numerous awards for their work including, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Humanitarian Award and The New York Times Company Nonprofit Excellence Award.

In 1998, Posner led the Human Rights First delegation to the Rome conference at which the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was adopted.

The organization was renamed to the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and, in 2003, renamed again to Human Rights First.

In his role, Posner built the organization from a staff of two, a few volunteers and a budget of $55,000 to its current staff of 60 and an annual budget of almost $9 million.

Posner has also focused efforts to strengthen systems of accountability in countries where human rights violations occur, especially for crimes like torture, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

Human Rights First launched its End Torture Now campaign in 2004.

Posner and Human Rights First led the advocacy efforts in support of the McCain Amendment which bans U.S. soldiers and officials from engaging in cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

The amendment won broad bipartisan congressional support and was signed into law in December 2005.

In April 2014 the center put out a report on the garment industry in Bangladesh, where the catastrophic collapse of a garment factory building killed more than 1,100 people in April 2013.

The report cited the common practice as indirect sourcing as a major risk factor in the safety of garment factories.

The center has published three subsequent reports on the garment industry in Bangladesh.

Led by its deputy director, Paul M. Barrett, the center has published a number of in-depth reports on technology policy and social media's impacts on politics in the United States and abroad.

In the summer of 2015, Posner was named the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics & Finance at the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, an endowed chairmanship position.

Its first report on this topic, "Harmful Content: The Role of Internet Platform Companies in Fighting Terrorist Incitement and Politically Motivated Disinformation," was published in November 2017 and called on social media companies to address the problem of disinformation by enhancing company governance, refining algorithms, and introducing more "friction" to users' experiences.

From July 2018 to September 2019, the center published three reports on online disinformation and its impact on American society and elections, the first dealing with Russian disinformation campaigns; the second with domestically generated disinformation; and the third on the impact of disinformation on the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

In 2019, he delivered the Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship Lecture at NYU.

In his remarks, he said, "We see growing opportunities for business schools, and the future business leaders we teach, to play key roles in building responsible global supply chains, an investment system that promotes greater economic equality, and well-managed social media platforms that advance democratic discourse."

Posner has testified dozens of times before the U.S. Congress on a wide range of human rights topics including the protection of refugees, anti-Semitism, human rights within the business community and human rights violations in the Philippines, China, Northern Ireland, Uganda, El Salvador and many other countries.

He is a frequent public commentator on these and other issues, regularly speaking at conferences and events in the United States and abroad.

His opinion essays have appeared in publications including the Boston Globe, Jerusalem Post Washington Post, The New York Times and Forbes.

Posner is director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and a clinical professor of business and society at Stern School of Business at New York University.

It is the first center to focus on human rights as part of a business school.

In June 2020, the center published "Who Moderates the Social Media Giants? A Call to End Outsourcing," which identifies problems with content moderation practices employed by major social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.

These include: lack of sufficient mental health services for moderators, insufficient content moderation in developing countries experiencing ethnic violence fueled by social media, and substandard working conditions for moderators.