Usman Hamid

Usman Hamid is the Chairperson of the Public Virtue Institute, as well as the Director of Amnesty International Indonesia. He is also a lecturer at Indonesia Jentera School of Law and a human rights lawyer and expert council at the Indonesian Bar Association (PERADI-RBA).

Usman was coordinator of KontraS, the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, an organisation that advocates for victims of State abuse in Indonesia. In 2004 he was appointed a member of the Presidential Fact-Finding Team that investigated the 2004 murder of prominent Indonesian human rights defender Munir Said Thalib.

Usman went on to a fellowship at Nottingham University in 2009. He served as an expert adviser to the International Center for Transitional Justice, Jakarta office, from 2010 until 2012. In 2011 Usman was appointed to the Presidential Working Unit for the Supervision and Management of Development, where he reviewed the policy on Indonesia’s Human Rights Nation Plan of Action of 2011–2014. In 2012 he co-founded Public Virtue Institute and the Indonesian Branch of Change.org, the world’s largest online petition platform.

He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University (2003) and held a fellowship at Nottingham University (2009).