Fortify Rights
 Fortify Rights      | |
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Fortify Rights is an independent NGO and nonprofit organisation based in Southeast Asia and registered in the United States and Switzerland.
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Fortify Rights works to ensure human rights for all.[1] We investigate human rights violations, engage stakeholders, and strengthen initiatives led by human rights defenders, affected communities, and civil society.
We believe in the influence of evidence-based research, the power of strategic truth-telling, and the importance of working in close collaboration with individuals, communities, and movements pushing for change.
Leadership
The Director is John Quinley III, who has been with Fortify Rights since 2016. Previously, he worked with the Women’s Opportunities Resource Center in Philadelphia and with Partners Relief and Development in Myanmar. He holds an MA from the School of Politics and International Relations at Nottingham University in the UK He also holds graduate certificates from the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University and the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies in Canada. His BA is from Eastern University in the US.
Matthew Smith is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Fortify Rights. He previously worked with Human Rights Watch, EarthRights International, Kerry Kennedy of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and as a community organiser and emergencies social worker in the United States. In 2019, he received a Fellowship at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and he was a 2014 Echoing Green Global Fellow. Matthew Smith's work has exposed genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, multi-billion-dollar corruption, and other human rights violations. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, TIME, The Guardian, and other outlets.
He has an MA in Human Rights and Religion from Columbia University and a BA in Political Science from Le Moyne College in the US.
Myanmar
On 24 January 2023, Fortify Rights and 16 complainants from Myanmar filed a criminal complaint in Germany under the principle of universal jurisdiction against senior Myanmar military generals and others for atrocity crimes.[2]
