Steve Crawshaw is Director of the Office of the Secretary General at Amnesty International, which he joined as international advocacy director in 2010. From 2002 to 2010, he was UK director and UN advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. He joined the Independent at launch in 1986, where he reported on the eastern European revolutions, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Balkan wars.He is co-author with John Jackson of Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World, preface by Václav Havel (Jon Snow: ‘brilliant’). His previous books were Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century (John le Carré: ‘rare and long overdue’) and Goodbye to the USSR: The Collapse of Soviet Power (Ryszard Kapuściński: ‘fascinating and vivid, should be read’).He studied Russian and German at the universities of Oxford and Leningrad (St Petersburg), and lived in Poland from 1978 to 1981.
