Nicholas Bequelin has spent his entire career in Asia working in the human rights field, most recently as Amnesty International’s regional director, based in Southeast Asia. A Mandarin-speaker and China specialist, he started his career as Human Rights Watch’s China researcher in Hong Kong, and later worked as a senior researcher in the organization’s Asia Division.
In addition to his major human rights reports and advocacy, Bequelin’s publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as the China Journal, the China Quarterly and the Journal of Asian Studies, and in many newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy. He is regularly interviewed by major international media.
As a visiting scholar at Yale Law School, Bequelin is working on a new project about the economic determinants of human rights violations in authoritarian regimes, as part of an effort to reevaluate how human rights advocacy can be more effective in authoritarian or low state-capacity settings.
Bequelin holds a PhD from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris, and is a graduate in Chinese from the School of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) and a former Honorary Research Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.