Adam Keith

Senior Director, Accountability

As Senior Director for Accountability, Adam Keith is responsible for Human Rights First’s work advancing human rights in U.S. foreign policy, with a focus on tools and institutions that help promote accountability for serious abuses and corruption.  He oversees our work coordinating a coalition of NGOs that use the Global Magnitsky Act and other targeted sanctions tools to pursue such accountability.   

Adam worked for ten years as a career civil servant for the U.S. Department of State, including an assignment to the National Security Council staff’s Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights directorate as director for war crimes and atrocity prevention (2013-14).  He also served as principal policy advisor to the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice; a desk officer for the African Great Lakes region and for Iraq; and a short-term political officer in Juba, South Sudan.  

After leaving the U.S. government in October 2017, Adam consulted for the Open Society Policy Center, Open Society Justice Initiative, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Human Rights First.  He is the co-author of the Holocaust Museum’s 2019 report, “By Any Other Name,” on the U.S. government’s policy and practice in making genocide determinations.  

Adam has a Master in Public Affairs degree from Princeton University’s public policy school and a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University.  He was a Fulbright fellow in Ghana, where he worked for the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, and he interned at the Office of the High Representative in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.  He has lived and worked in Zimbabwe and South Sudan and studied in France.  He speaks French, holds on to fragments of other languages acquired in the course of his travels, and lives in New York City.

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