Mihra Rittmann

Mihra Rittmann, Central Asia adviser, leads Human Rights Watch’s work on Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. For nearly two decades, she has covered human rights developments in Central Asia for Human Rights Watch, including the crackdown on Uzbekistan’s human rights defenders in the aftermath of the Andijan massacre, the June 2010 ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, and the government’s violent response to nationwide protests in Kazakhstan in January 2022. She has written reports on a wide range of human rights issues across the region including disability and labor rights, violations of freedom of assembly, association, and speech, and government misuse of counterterrorism laws to crack down on dissent. She has lived and worked in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Rittmann is also chair of Human Rights Watch’s Fellowship Program. 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 and some basic Turkish.