Ahmed Benchemsi

Ahmed Benchemsi is the Advocacy and Communications Director for Human Rights Watch’s the Middle East and North Africa division. Ahmed is also a career journalist. The founder, publisher and editor of Morocco’s best-selling weeklies TelQuel and Nishan, and the web magazine FreeArabs.com, he was awarded twice Best investigative Journalist in the Arab World by the European Union. Ahmed was published in Time magazine, Newsweek, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Le Monde, and other publications. A co-author of “Taking to the streets: The Transformation of Arab Activism” (2014, Johns Hopkins University Press), he also produced articles for academic institutions and think tanks including the National Endowment for Democracy, the Middle East Institute, and the Cato Institute. He is also regularly interviewed or quoted in media outlets such as CNN, PBS, NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, and more. Ahmed has an MPhil in Political Science from Sciences Po (Paris), an MA in Development Economics from the Sorbonne, and was a fellow at Stanford University’s Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. Ahmed is fluent in Arabic and French.