Jared Genser has been an international human rights lawyer for more than two decades. He is Managing Director of Perseus Strategies, a public interest law firm, Special Advisor on the Responsibility to Protect to the Organization of American States, and outside General Counsel to the Neurorights Foundation. Referred to by the New York Times as “The Extractor” for his work freeing political prisoners worldwide, he has served as pro bono counsel to five Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, including the last three Laureates who won their Prize while imprisoned — Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma, 2006-2010), Liu Xiaobo (China, 2010-2017), and Ales Bialiatski (Belarus, 2023-Present) — as well as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Elie Wiesel.

Genser was previously a partner in the government affairs practice of DLA Piper LLP and a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. He has also been an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the University of Michigan Law School, across which he taught semester-long seminars about the UN Security Council seven times.

In addition, he was an Associate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University from 2014-2016 and a Visiting Fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy from 2006-2007. Genser’s other past clients have included former Czech Republic President Václav Havel, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, and former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed. Coming from his experience freeing his first client as a law student, in 2001 he founded Freedom Now, a non- governmental organization that works to free prisoners of conscience worldwide.

Genser holds a B.S. from Cornell University, an M.P.P. from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was an Alumni Public Service Fellow, and a J.D. cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School.

He is author of The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention: Commentary and Guide to Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2019). In addition, he is co-editor of The UN Security Council in the Age of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Responsibility to Protect: The Promise of Stopping Mass Atrocities in Our Times (Oxford University Press, 2011). His forthcoming book is a co-edited volume with former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein entitled The Oxford Handbook on the UN Human Rights System (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Genser has received the Tällberg Eliasson Global Leadership Prize and American Bar Association’s International Human Rights Award. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. And he was selected as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum (Class of 2008).