39 Facts About Reed Brody

Reed Brody currently works with victims of the former dictator of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, is a lawyer for the ousted president of Niger Mohamed Bazoum and is a member of the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua.

Reed Brody is the author of several books, including To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissene Habre.

Reed Brody was born in Budapest, Hungary on July 20,1953.

Reed Brody's 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.

Reed Brody's mother, Francesca Cash, was an artist and an arts teacher at a Brooklyn inner-city school.

Reed 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.

Reed Brody earned his JD degree from Columbia University School of Law.

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

Reed Brody conducted a speaking tour of over 60 US cities and appeared as co-counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights in litigation in US federal court to stop US aid to contras.

Reed Brody's report was introduced into evidence in the case Nicaragua v United States at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

From 1987 until 1992, Reed Brody worked for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, as the Director of its Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, 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.

Reed Brody 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.

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

Reed Brody then served as Director of the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador 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.

Reed Brody was a member of the UN Preliminary Mission to establish a human rights verification mission in Guatemala in 1994.

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

Reed 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.

Reed Brody led an Amnesty International fact-finding mission to Sierra Leone.

Reed Brody was a member of the US National Criminal Justice Commission, which produced The Real War on Crime, published in 1996.

In 1997, Reed 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.

Reed 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.

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

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

Reed Brody was an observer at the 2012 trial of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon 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.

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

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

Reed Brody attended legal proceedings at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay Cuba in 2010.

Since 1999, Reed Brody has worked with the victims of Hissene Habre, the former dictator of Chad, to bring him and his accomplices to justice.

Since the verdicts, Reed Brody has continued to work with the victims for implementation of the courts' reparation decisions.

In 2022, Reed Brody published a book about the case, To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissene Habre.

Reed Brody's passport was confiscated and armed men escorted him to the offices of the secret service, the Direction generale du renseignement et de l'investigation where he was held in police custody for two hours before being expelled on an Air France flight to Paris.

Reed Brody is active in human rights causes in the United States.

In January 2017, Reed Brody was elected to the International Commission of Jurists.

Reed Brody is on the Boards of Democracy for the Arab World Now, the Rose Lokissim Association and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.

Reed Brody worked with the Gambia Bar Association on a series of multi-stakeholder consultations beginning in 2019 to examine how to follow up on any prosecution recommendations by the TRRC.

In December 2023, Reed Brody was an observer on behalf of The International Commission of Jurists at the decision by the Hof van Justitie, the highest court in Suriname, confirming the conviction of former president Desi Bouterse for the 1982 murders of 15 political prisoners.

Reed Brody, who currently lives in Barcelona and a small village near Carcassonne, is a regular commentator on French and Spanish media on issues of war crimes, international relations and US politics.

Reed Brody's articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Le Monde, Le Soir, and El Pais, among others.

Reed Brody has taught law as a lecturer and adjunct professor at Columbia University Law School and American University's Washington College of Law and been a guest lecturer at the law schools of Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, NYU, Wisconsin and Yale.