Peter Bouckaert

Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch’s Emergencies Director and an expert in humanitarian crises, is responsible for coordinating the organization’s response to major wars and other human rights crises.

A Belgian-born Stanford Law School graduate specializing in the laws of war, Bouckaert is a veteran of fact-finding missions to Lebanon, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Macedonia, Indonesia, Uganda, and Sierra Leone, among others.

Most recently, Bouckaert has been working on the Mediterranean Refugee crisis, where he has conducted investigations into human rights abuses by European border controls and the difficulties faced by refugees on their journey. Bouckaert is featured in the 2014 documentary film E-Team, which was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

In 2014 Bouckaert was in the Central African Republic, where he conducted investigations into ethnic cleansing and war crimes committed during the current civil war. In 2011 he was in Libya, where he investigated the use of landmines, the execution of prisoners and arbitrary arrests of African migrant workers. He has testified about war crimes before the United States Senate, the Council of Europe, and at the Yugoslav Tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague, and has written opinion pieces for papers around the world.

His work has been profiled in Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Stanford Lawyer, and The Santa Barbara Independent Newspaper.

Bouckaert was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Catholic University of Louvain for his work on human rights.