Bede Sheppard

Bede Sheppard is the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s children’s rights division. For more than a decade he has specialized in investigating war crimes and other abuses involving students, teachers, and schools during armed conflict. He was a leading civil society advocate during the process that led to the 2014 Guidelines for Protecting Schools and Universities from Military Use during Armed Conflict, and the 2015 Safe Schools Declaration. He has also conducted research and advocacy on the right to education during the Covid pandemic, alternative care for children, the use of the death penalty on children, child domestic workers, extrajudicial executions, and forced evictions from informal settlements. He has conducted human rights investigations in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Japan, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Nigeria, the Philippines, Thailand, Ukraine, and Yemen. He has previously worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Croatia, and as an attorney with a Washington DC law firm, conducting investigations into human rights abuses related to extractive industries in Indonesia and South Africa. He holds a bachelors degree from Harvard College, a masters degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a law degree from Columbia University. During the summer term of 2016, he was a visiting scholar at the New Zealand Centre for Human Rights Law, Policy, and Practice at the Faculty of Law at Auckland University, and during the spring term of 2022, he was a research visitor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford.