Steve Crawshaw has written and worked on human rights and justice for more than thirty years. He was a journalist at Granada Television before joining the Independent at launch in 1986, where his roles included Russia and East Europe Editor during the east European revolutions and Balkan wars, then Germany bureau chief and chief foreign correspondent. In 2002, he joined Human Rights Watch as UK director and then UN advocacy director in New York. In 2010 he joined Amnesty International as international advocacy director and then Director of the Office of the Secretary General. In 2018 he became policy and advocacy director at Freedom from Torture. His previous books are Goodbye to the USSR (1992), Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century (2004), Small Acts of Resistance (with John Jackson, foreword by Václav Havel, 2010) and Street Spirit: The Power of Protest and Mischief (foreword by Ai Weiwei, 2017). He studied Russian and German at the universities of Oxford and St Petersburg, and lived in Poland from 1978 to 1981.
