Sharan Srinivas

Sharan Srinivas (LinkedIn) is Director of Protecting Rights Defenders at Open Society Foundations’ London office. In this role, he oversees a five-year strategy that seeks to resource holistic protection ecosystems of actors at the national level that offer prevention, protection, and redress to rights defenders, and reveal how political economies and narratives contribute to attacks.

Over the past eight years, he has held various roles in OSF, where he led teams and developed transnational strategies and programming to advance democratic renewal, expand civic space and protect human rights defenders at risk through grant-making and advocacy. In this role, he worked to build a pioneering transnational network of regional organizations to defend the right to protest. He also worked with Open Society regional programs to support the development of regional- and national-level networks that provide rapid and tailor-made protection to grassroots activists at risk in countries and regions including Cambodia, Nigeria, South Africa, and South Asia.

Prior to joining Open Society in 2018, Sharan spent more than a decade working on human rights defenders’ protection, development, access to justice, and police reforms with the Right Livelihood Award Foundation (Sweden and Switzerland), the Centre for Policy Research and International Studies (Malaysia), and the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (India). He holds an MA in international relations and diplomacy from Seton Hall University and a BA (Honors) in political science from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.