OUR VOICE MATTERS

Masha Lisitsyna

Open Society Foundations

Masha Lisitsyna (@MashalNyc) is a senior program manager with the Global Programs’ Securing Democratic Freedoms at the Open Society Foundations where she focuses on protection of human rights defenders and freedom of assembly.  Previously, she served as a senior managing legal officer with the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) where she led the work on advocacy and litigation to advance prevention, accountability, and reparations for torture in Eurasia, Asia, and Latin America.

 She is a co-author, among others, of a global study Who Polices the Police? The Role of Independent Agencies in Criminal Investigations of State Agents (OSJI, 2021), articles and op-eds in Torture Journal, Just Security, Bloomberg Law and Americas Quarterly. Lisitsyna has also served as a Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch and was a founding director of a human rights NGO in Kyrgyzstan. In 2005, she was elected a member of Kyrgyzstan’s Constitutional Assembly, tasked with preparing Constitutional amendments. Lisitsyna is a 2007 Yale World Fellow and has been recognized by the World Economic Forum in 2009 as a Young Global Leader.