"Human rights research and new technology"

Philip Luther, Research and Advocacy Director, Middle East & North Africa, Amnesty International

During the course of the academic year 2018/19 IBEI hosts a series of lectures by practitioners in the field of international relations and development.

The practitioner lecture series is intended to give IBEI students and attendees an opportunity to engage with international professionals about their personal work experience, the organizations they represent, and to learn about possible career trajectories in international governmental and non-governmental organizations. Each lecture will allow ample room for questions and inputs from the audience. All IBEI community is welcome.

Use the hashtag #IBEIpracSeminars to share and comment on the social networks.

Philip Luther is Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International. In this position, he has responsibility for the development and implementation of the organisation’s research and advocacy on the region, and overseeing work done by teams in Beirut, Tunis, Jerusalem and London. The role involves frequent travel within the region and extensive engagement with senior officials from governments and intergovernmental organizations, as well as partners in civil society and victims and survivors of human rights violations.

Philip Luther’s talk will focus on the way in which research on human rights issues increasingly uses new technological means, such as analysis of satellite imagery, video forensics, etc.

In his earlier work Philip Luther was Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International between 2011 and 2015. In this position he also oversaw the development and implementation of the organisation’s research and advocacy on the region, but with the teams all based in one Programme in London. He had the role of Deputy Director of the Programme from 2007 to 2011, supervising research and campaigning by teams working on the Gulf and Levant sub-regions. Before that, he worked for nine years in Amnesty International’s North Africa team, first as a campaigner from 1998 to 2000 and then as a researcher from 2000 to 2007, focusing particularly on Morocco and Western Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.

Philip Luther worked in Cairo, Egypt, between 1995 and 1997 as an Arabic-English translator and sub-editor on several publications, including the English-language weekly newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly. He graduated from Oxford University in Arabic and modern Hebrew in 1994. He is a British national.