Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, oversees the organization's work throughout Asia, especially in Southeast Asia, North Korea and Japan.
Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 2009, he worked for more than a decade in Southeast Asia on human rights, labor rights, protection of migrant workers, and counter-human trafficking efforts with a variety of non-governmental organizations, international and regional trade union federations, and UN agencies. As program manager of the UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP), he oversaw the successful negotiation of the first regional inter-governmental agreement on human trafficking in the greater Mekong sub-region. Prior to UNIAP, he led the Mainland Southeast Asia office of the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center, working on trade union rights, democratic political reform, and rights of migrant workers, focusing primarily on Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand. A 1997 graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, he is fluent in Thai and Lao.