Masha Lisitsyna, a democracy and human rights advocate, has served for the last 15 years in several senior program manager roles at the Open Society Foundations. At OSF’s Global Programs, she focused on strategy and grant-making on expanding democratic freedoms and protection of human rights defenders around the world as well as facilitating South-South peer exchanges among activists. At the Open Society Justice Initiative, she led strategic litigation, advocacy and capacity strengthening to advance accountability and reparations for torture. Prior to OSF, Masha served as a researcher at Human Rights Watch, and earlier in her career was thefounding director of Youth Human Rights Group, a human rights NGO in Kyrgyzstan. In 2005, Masha was elected a member of Kyrgyzstan’s Constitutional Assembly, tasked with preparing amendments that improved rule of law guarantees in the Constitution.
Based in New York City, Masha currently collaborates with several organizations in Europe, Latin America and Africa to develop meaningful partnerships between activists and lawyers from Ukraine and the Global South with a focus on accountability for enforced disappearances, memorialization, damages to the environment and building strong movements of victims ofrights violations. She also is part of the advisory council of PILnet, an NGO that serves as a global network for public interest law.
Masha has been a Yale World Fellow, Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow and was recognized by the World Economic Forum in 2009 as a Young Global Leader. Among other publications, sherecently co-authored global studies on judicial reparations “Repairing from the Bench” and on investigations of crimes committed by the police “Who Polices the Police?”. She has testified before the U.S. Helsinki Commission, participated in numerous hearings and events at the United Nations, OSCE and European Parliament. Her op-eds have appeared in Bloomberg Law, Americas Quarterly, Just Security, Nation (Kenya) and other.