Reed Brody

Reed Brody is a Hungarian-American human rights lawyer and prosecutor.

He specializes in helping victims pursue abusive leaders for atrocities, and has gained fame as the "Dictator Hunter".

He was counsel for the victims in the case of the exiled former dictator of Chad, Hissène Habré – who was convicted of crimes against humanity in Senegal – and has worked with the victims of Augusto Pinochet and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

He currently works with victims of the former dictator of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh.

He is author of several books including To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré.

Brody was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 20, 1953.

His father, Ervin Brody, a Hungarian Jew, who was a major influence in his life, survived forced labor in German camps during World War II, eventually escaping to join the Soviet Red Army and participate in the liberation of Budapest before emigrating to the United States and teaching at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

His mother, Francesca Cash, was an artist and an arts teacher at a Brooklyn inner-city school.

Brody received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Fairleigh Dickinson University where he was Student Government President and a leader in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

He earned his J.D. degree from Columbia University School of Law.

While a law student, Brody worked a year in Paris as a teaching assistant at the Université de Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne).

Brody holds an honorary doctorate from Fairleigh Dickinson University and was awarded a Public Interest Achievement Award by Columbia University Law School.

After law school, Brody was the New York State Assistant Attorney General from 1980 to 1984 where he authored consumer protection laws and advocated on behalf of consumers and workers in class action-type suits against large corporations and financial institutions.

He was called "the leading expert in the country on career-counseling malpractices.” Brody left his position as Assistant Attorney General to research and uncover a pattern of atrocities against Nicaraguan civilians by US-funded "contras". His report, Contra Terror in Nicaragua, received national front-page coverage and led to U.S. Congressional hearings and a temporary halt to contra funding. Brody conducted a speaking tour of over 60 U.S. cities and appeared as co-counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights in litigation in U.S. federal court to stop U.S. aid to contras. His report was also introduced into evidence in the case Nicaragua v. United States at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He was criticized by United States President Ronald Reagan, who described him as a Sandinista "sympathizer". From 1987 until 1992, Brody worked for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, as the Director of its Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers (CIJL), where he organized campaigns on behalf of harassed and detained jurists and engaged in high-level regional and national seminars on the independence of numerous judiciary systems around the world.

He helped draft the UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers which were adopted in 1991 and the same year was one of the advocates for the creation of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

Together with P. N. Bhagwati, former Chief Justice of India, he assisted the government of Mongolia on behalf of the United Nations in preparing its 1991 constitution.

In 1992, Brody became Executive Director of the International Human Rights Law Group (which became Global Rights), where he served until 1994 placing activists in-country to train and empower locally based rights advocates in a dozen countries.

In 1993, he was spokesman for the more than 3,000 NGO representatives at the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna.

Brody then served as Director of the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) from 1994 until 1995, where he led a staff of human rights officers and police observers responsible for verifying respect for human rights, monitoring compliance with peace accords, and coordinating international support to El Salvador’s judiciary and Human Rights Ombudsman.

He was also a member of the UN Preliminary Mission to establish a human rights verification mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) in 1994.

In 1995, Brody helped found the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Haiti to prosecute human rights crimes committed during de facto military rule.

The investigations he began led to the convictions of 57 military and paramilitary officers for the "Raboteau Massacre," the most significant rights prosecution in Haitian history.

Brody served as media liaison for the exiled Tibetan Women's Delegation at the 1995 UN Women’s Conference in Beijing whose harassment by the Chinese authorities became one of the symbols of the conference.

In 1995, he was expelled from occupied East Timor by Indonesian authorities.

He led an Amnesty International fact-finding mission to Sierra Leone (1996).

He was a member of the U.S. National Criminal Justice Commission, which produced The Real War on Crime, published in 1996.

As former Executive Secretary, he was a coordinator of the International Commission of Jurists' report Tibet: Human Rights and the Rule of Law, published in 1997.

In 1997, Brody was Deputy Director of the United Nations Secretary General’s Investigative Team in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, charged with probing atrocities committed by troops loyal to Laurent Kabila.

Brody was with Human Rights Watch from 1998 to 2016 and was an integral part of the organization’s efforts to hold perpetrators of large-scale human rights violations accountable for their crimes.

Most notably, Brody directed Human Rights Watch’s participation in the landmark case of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet before the British House of Lords.

Brody called the Lords’ decision in the Pinochet case – that the Chilean did not enjoy immunity and could be prosecuted on the basis of universal jurisdiction despite his status as a former head of state – a "wake-up call" to tyrants and a “spark of hope for victims.” In the wake of the Pinochet case, Brody began working with victims to pursue other former exiled leaders including Hissène Habré of Chad, Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, Jean-Claude Duvalier and Raul Cédras of Haiti, and Idi Amin of Uganda.

He wrote the Human Rights Watch booklet The Pinochet Precedent: How Victims can Pursue Human Rights Criminals Abroad.

Brody also participated in the 1998 Rome Conference which led the creation of the International Criminal Court.

In April 2010, Brody spoke at a rally of over 60,000 in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, noting the irony that Judge Garzón was prosecuted for attempting to apply the very principles that he had successfully promoted internationally.

Brody expressed indignation that Judge Garzón was the first judge in Spain to be put on trial for ordering wiretaps.

In 2010, he assisted the Haitian government in building the case against former dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, and he co-authored the HRW report Haiti’s Rendezvous with History: The Case of Jean-Claude Duvalier.

He is featured in a video on the case produced by Human Rights Watch.

Brody was an observer at the 2012 trial of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón for refusing to apply Spain’s amnesty law and proceeding with an investigation into atrocities committed under Francisco Franco and during Spain’s civil war.

Judge Garzón is best known for using the doctrine of universal jurisdiction to investigate war crimes and torture across national lines, most notably ordering the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and seeking to indict members of the Bush administration for their role in torturing prisoners.

Although Garzón was acquitted in the Franco-era trial, on 9 February 2012, the Supreme Court of Spain convicted Judge Garzón of illegally wiretapping conversations to discover evidence of illicit money laundering tactics being used by suspects and their lawyers.