International Human Rights Award

2009 Award Recipient: Edwin Rekosh – Founder and Executive Director of the Public Interest Law Institute (PILI)

Edwin Rekosh is the founder and Executive Director of the Public Interest Law Institute (PILI), an international NGO that advances human rights around the world by stimulating public interest legal advocacy and developing the institutions necessary to sustain it. Since 1991, Rekosh has been working to advance human rights principles and promote the development of public interest law throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the former Soviet Republics, and more recently, in China.

The inspiration for establishing PILI came from Mr. Rekosh’s work assisting the development of human rights groups in Romania and then elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe during the early 1990s. As a consultant to the Ford Foundation in the mid-1990s, he first explored the potential for public interest law to serve as a helpful rubric for the activities of former dissidents seeking to engage with their countries’ newly emerging constitutional orders and the legal systems those orders spawned. Groundbreaking symposia in Oxford, England and Durban, South Africa supported by the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute helped launch this effort, with PILI established to sustain it over the longer term.

Mr. Rekosh also teaches Human Rights, Law and Development at Columbia Law School and has been a visiting professor at Central European University in Budapest. Prior to founding PILI, Rekosh worked for the International Human Rights Law Group (now Global Rights) in Washington, DC and Romania, practiced law in New York, and co-founded the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

A sought-after public speaker, Mr. Rekosh has written and spoken extensively about human rights and the rule of law. His most recent article, titled “Constructing Public Interest Law,” appeared in the UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs. Rekosh was educated at Columbia University School of Law and Cornell University.