Ian Matthew Kysel is the Dash/Muse Fellow with the Human Rights Institute. Before joining the Institute, he was the Aryeh Neier Fellow with the Human Rights Program of the American Civil Liberties Union and the US Program of Human Rights Watch and coordinated the organizations' legal and advocacy work related to the solitary confinement of children.
Kysel is an author or co-author of human rights reports on the solitary confinement of children in prisons and jails in the United States; prison conditions for youth offenders serving life without parole sentences in the United States; and, with the Human Rights Institute, on the resettlement of Iraqi refugees to the United States. He has also published on the rights of international migrants and sits on the steering committee of the International Migrants Bill of Rights (IMBR) Initiative, which is based at Georgetown. His academic research interests also include work at the intersection of U.S. constitutional law and the enforcement of human rights obligations.
Professor Kysel has testified before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and a U.S. state Legislative Committee and his human rights work has regularly been the subject of reporting, editorials and opinion pieces in the press, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Associated Press, and on television news magazines and on public radio. He has worked on a range of constitutional, international, human rights and migration law issues with non-profit organizations, the U.S. federal government, international organizations, and in the private sector.
Professor Kysel graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown, where he was a Global Law Scholar and received a J.D., a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies and the Bettina Pruckmayr Award. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore College.