Mihra Rittmann

Mihra Rittmann, senior Central Asia researcher, leads Human Rights Watch’s work on Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, covering a wide range of human rights issues including freedom of assembly, association, and speech. In recent years Rittmann has researched and written reports on labor and disability rights in Kazakhstan. She previously lived and worked in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, documenting the aftermath of the June 2010 ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan and the persecution of Uzbekistan’s human rights defenders. Before she joined Human Rights Watch, Rittmann spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Moscow, collecting oral histories from former political prisoners of the Gulag, the Soviet prison camp system. Rittmann holds a master’s in human rights from the University of Essex and is a graduate of the University of Chicago. She speaks Russian.