Akshaya Kumar

Akshaya Kumar is the Director of Crisis Advocacy at Human Rights Watch. She oversees the organization’s advocacy response to emergencies and develops innovative strategies to respond to evolving crises. Kumar joined HRW as Deputy United Nations Director in 2015 and represented the organization at UN headquarters in New York for four years. She previously worked at the Enough Project where she helped launch The Sentry, an initiative that seeks to freeze war criminals out of the international financial system. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Akshaya holds a JD from Columbia University and an LLM in human rights, conflict and justice from the School of Oriental and African Studies. She speaks Tamil, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic and English.