Nicholas Opiyo

Nicholas Opiyo is a world-renowned and award-winning human rights attorney who advocates for civil liberties, democracy, and justice in Uganda, across Africa, and beyond. Between 2013 and early 2025, Opiyo founded and served as the executive director and lead attorney at Chapter Four Uganda, a civil rights charity working to defend civil liberties. He has been a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at Stanford University and the Global Health Program at the University of San Francisco. He also served as the board chair of Action Aid Uganda until 2020. Opiyo was a member of the Human Rights Advisory Board BENETECH, a Silicon Valley human rights and tech company based in Palo Alto, California, among other roles. Until March 2017, he was a member of the team of experts to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Peaceful Assembly and Association. He is a recipient of the Human Rights Tulip Prize from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2021), the German Africa Prize (2017), the European Union Parliament Sakharov Fellows Prize (2016), and the Voices for Justice Award from Human Rights Watch (2015). In 2021-2022, Opiyo served as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School's Scholars-at-Risk program, and in 2022-2023, he was an LL.M. Human Rights Fellow at Columbia Law’s Human Rights Institute.