Stephen Rickard is a Distinguished Fellow in the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown Law.

Rickard led the Washington Office of the Open Society Foundations and served in other senior roles in OSF for more than 20 years. While at OSF he helped lead the successful fight to release the Senate Torture Report to the public. Most recently Rickard led OSF’s five-year Foreign Policy Constituency Building Project, an innovative philanthropic effort to strengthen the effectiveness of the progressive foreign policy advocacy.

Rickard came to Washington after six years as a litigator at White & Case to serve as senior foreign policy aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He drafted Moynihan’s controversial bill to close the CIA, helped pass legislation purging McCarthy-era “lookout lists” and served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He subsequently joined the State Department as Senior Advisor for South Asian Affairs and later served as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Human Rights, Democracy and Labor.

Rickard led the Washington advocacy team of Amnesty International USA where, among other things, he and AIUSA played a key role in passing the landmark Leahy Law prohibiting U.S. assistance for foreign forces committing human rights abuses. He has testified before Congress numerous times.

Rickard also served as coordinator for the Human Rights Executive Directors Leadership Group, as Director of the RFK Human Rights Center and created and led the Freedom Investment Project.

Rickard is a graduate of Yale Law School, the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Adrian College.