Larry Cox served as executive director of Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) from 2006 to 2011. A veteran human rights advocate, he came to AIUSA after serving 11 years as senior program officer for the Ford Foundation’s Human Rights unit, where he focused on the advancement of international justice, economic, social and cultural rights, and the strengthening of a domestic movement for human rights.
In assuming leadership of AIUSA, Cox was returning to the movement he had served for 14 years in a range of positions. In 1976 he joined the organization as its first press officer. During the next nine years he established the AIUSA Program to Abolish the Death Penalty and then took on the role of its first Communications Director and Deputy Executive Director. He then spent five years as Deputy Secretary General at Amnesty International's world headquarters in London.
Cox also served as an AI delegate on numerous international missions, examining pressing human rights concerns in Australia, Guinea-Bissau, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, the United Kingdom and Vietnam.
In 1990, Cox became the executive director of the Rainforest Foundation, an international organization that works with indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon to protect their rights. During his five years at the Rainforest Foundation, the organization succeeded in wining the demarcation of a vast indigenous territory in Brazil and laid the ground work for expanding its work to other countries.
While at the Ford Foundation, Cox co-edited and co-wrote the introduction to the report, Close to Home: Case Studies of Human Rights Work in the US. The report examines the traditional human rights tools—such as fact-finding, litigation, organizing and advocacy—that U.S. human rights organizations use to reduce poverty, promote workers’ rights and environmental justice, abolish the death penalty and end discrimination.
As executive director of AIUSA, Cox moved the organization to a more focused and robust model of campaigning which contributed to a number of advances in the areas of protecting human rights defenders, combatting torture and other human rights violations committed in the so called war on terror, stopping violence against women (most notably indigenous women in the United States), reducing maternal mortality, and abolishing the death penalty both worldwide and within the United States.
Cox holds a B.A. in history from Mount Union College, has completed graduate work at the University of Geneva and is currently pursuing an M.A. in religion and human rights at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
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