Brian Concannon, Jr.

Human rights lawyer and activist Brian Concannon is the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH). Brian is a trusted voice on human rights in Haiti and US policy to its oldest neighbor, through his writing and speaking to a wide range of audiences. But he is most proud of his work helping Haitian human rights advocates make their own voices heard, from the lawyers at the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux to the victims of the UN cholera in Haiti. Brian lived and worked in Haiti from 1995 to 2004, first with the United Nations, and after 1996 with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) in Port-au-Prince. He returned to the US to start IJDH in 2004, when a US-supported coup d’etat overthrew Haiti’s elected government and demonstrated that no progress in Haiti would be sustainable unless the US and other powerful countries respected Haitian sovereignty. Brian is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and Middlebury College. He held a Brandeis International Fellowship in Human Rights, Intervention and International Law from 2001-2003, and was a 2005-06 Wasserstein Public Interest Law Fellow at Harvard Law School.