Visiting Scholar Maina Kiai discusses movement building and the Constitutional right to assemble as uprisings continue across the United States and around the world in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Kiai is a prominent Kenyan human rights lawyer who served as the first-ever United Nations Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association from 2011-2017. He led fact-finding missions in Ferguson, Baltimore, Jackson, and other U.S. cities and urged U.S. lawmakers to stop an alarming trend to curb freedom of assembly around Standing Rock, women’s marches, and #BlackLivesMatter. When he stepped down as UNSR, he resumed Kiai resumed his work as co-director of InformAction, a community organizing NGO in Kenya. He is a non-resident Scholar at the Sorensen Center and served as the 2019 Scholar-in-Residence. He currently leads a new partnership initiative at Human Rights Watch to build alliances and engage communities in human rights work.

The Sorensen Center’s “Critical Voices: From Local to Global” speaker series features extraordinary leaders from around the world discussing groundbreaking issues.