Minky Worden

USA

Role

Director of Global Initiatives

Organization

Humans Rights Watch

As Human Rights Watch's Director of Global Initiatives, Minky Worden develops and implements international outreach and advocacy campaigns, focusing especially on how sport can advance human rights. She has worked at Human Rights Watch for 20 years, previously serving as Media Director, working with the world’s journalists to help them cover crises, wars, human rights abuses and political developments in some 90 countries worldwide.

Worden has also taught as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Social Affairs since 2013. Before joining Human Rights Watch in 1998, Worden lived and worked in Hong Kong as an adviser to Democratic Party Chairman Martin Lee, and worked at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., as a speechwriter for the US Attorney General and in the Executive Office for US Attorneys.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Worden speaks Cantonese and German, and is an elected member of the Overseas Press Club's Board of Governors. She has three sons and is the author and editor of three books, including China's Great Leap, on reform efforts around the Olympic Games Beijing 2008.

The speakers

Using the unique power of sport to bring people together, the Olympism in Action Forum saw a range of global players, including Olympic Movement stakeholders, athletes, private and public sector leaders, NGO representatives, academics, artists and the media come together to talk on topical contemporary issues. Chosen because of their ability to effect change and their wide range of sometimes differing opinions, the speakers led lively debates and seeked to challenge received wisdom to inspire new ways of thinking.