Our Leadership

Gary Haugen serves as President and CEO of International Justice Mission. Mr. Haugen received a B.A. in Social Studies, magna cum laude, from Harvard University, and a J.D. from the University of Chicago, cum laude, where he was the Ford Foundation Scholar in International Law. He also served as the Visiting Scholar in Politics at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Until April of 1997, Mr. Haugen was a Senior Trial Attorney with the Police Misconduct Task Force of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. When Congress granted the Attorney General new authority to pursue enforcement action against police departments with a "pattern or practice" of misconduct, Mr. Haugen was selected to serve on a small task force with national enforcement authority.

In 1994, Mr. Haugen was detailed from the U.S. Department of Justice to the United Nation's Center for Human Rights where he served as the Officer in Charge of the U.N.'s genocide investigation in Rwanda. During the fall of 1994, he directed an international team of lawyers, criminal prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and forensics experts in the gathering of evidence against the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide. Mr. Haugen developed the investigative strategy, protocols, and field methodology for developing eye-witness testimony and physical evidence from nearly a hundred mass grave and massacre sites across Rwanda. He also personally directed and conducted field investigations at various sites.

Before joining the U.S. Department of Justice, Mr. Haugen worked for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, based in New York. In the late 1980's, his work focused on a structural examination of the Philippine government's prosecution of human rights abuses committed by the police and military. In his work, Mr. Haugen investigated multiple murders and other violent abuses by the military and police, participated in the exhumations of victims, and in the provision of protection services for witnesses. Out of his analysis, Mr. Haugen authored a book published by the Lawyers Committee entitled Impunity: Human Rights Prosecutions in the Philippines.

In the mid-1980's, Mr. Haugen served on the executive committee of the National Initiative for Reconciliation in South Africa. The NIR, chaired by then-Bishop Desmond Tutu and Michael Cassidy of African Enterprise, was a movement of Christian leaders devoted to the cause of political reform and racial reconciliation.

Mr. Haugen currently serves on the Human Rights Leadership Coalition and on the Board of the Overseers of the Berkeley Journal of International Law. Mr. Haugen is the 2007 recipient of Prison Fellowship's annual William Wilberforce Award, recognizing an individual who has made a difference in the face of formidable societal problems and injustices. At a 2005 event sponsored by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, he moderated a panel discussion on sex trafficking between Senators Hillary Clinton and Sam Brownback.

Mr. Haugen and the work of IJM have been featured by the "Today Show", "The Oprah Winfrey Show",  Dateline NBC, FOX News, MSNBC, CNN, National Public Radio, Forbes Magazine and The New York Times. Mr. Haugen has authored numerous articles on foreign affairs, international law and human rights. His latest book, The Locust Effect (2014), examines why the end of poverty requires the end of everyday violence against the poor. Mr. Haugen currently resides in the Washington, DC, area with his family.