With deep sadness, we share the news that our dear friend Tony Elliott has passed away.
Tony is most well known for being the founder of Time Out. A touching obituary of Tony’s life and legacy was published in the Guardian earlier this week, and another in the New York Times, which speaks to the huge impact he had upon the publishing industry and beyond.
But beyond these immense successes, Tony was also a part of the fabric of Human Rights Watch, and in particular our London community. Tony became a London Committee member during our seminal years in London in the late 1990’s, served as the chair of the London Committee for a number of years and was a member of HRW Board of Directors from 2006 through to 2015.
At HRW, we were so fortunate to work so closely with Tony. In the formative years of the London Committee, our HRW Film Festival and our outreach activities in London, Tony made sure that he supported us in every way he could - ensuring that the HRW Film Festival film listings were published in Time Out, publishing our job postings in the magazine, lending us marketing and public relations expertise and regularly arranging editorials on human rights issues. And when Time Out went global, Tony made sure that HRW was also able to benefit from this globalization, connecting us to the new Time Out franchises in New York, Chicago, Istanbul and beyond. Tony was the driving force behind so many of our London initiatives bridging art, culture and human rights – including our Cries from the Heart series, which brought the powerful combination of famous actors, playwrights and human rights issues to our audiences. None of this would have been possible without Tony’s introductions, generosity and creative spirit and energy.
Tony invested in HRW just as if it was his own business - he brought the same energy, vision, thought and strategy that he brought to Time Out to propel our London presence into a vibrant community of like-minded individuals holding the shared belief that protecting and defending human rights would make the world a better place. Tony, his wife Janey and his 3 children were very much part of the HRW family, and hosted us at their home on many occasions.
In many ways it was the initiatives that Tony pioneered that have shaped us as an organisation – advocating for a HRW that is diverse and inclusive, an organisation that speaks to the younger generation, that has links across a spectrum of fields especially with culture, music, theatre and the arts. He always wanted us to be brave and ambitious.
It is a true testament to Tony’s legacy that we have just held our first big public engagement event – The Future We Build Together - reaching out to thousands of new human rights activists across the globe. This is exactly the direction he was pushing us for more than 20 years, and we only wish that he was still with us to have seen it together. We are so grateful to have had the chance to call Tony a dear friend, and for the tremendous impact that he had upon our work at Human Rights Watch. We will miss him dearly.