Chip Pitts

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Chip Pitts is an international attorney, investor/entrepreneur, and law educator who serves as a volunteer leader of a number of civil liberties and human rights organizations. As Board President of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, he has helped lead the national movement to educate American citizens about recent encroachments on freedom in connection with the U.S.-led "war on terror." As Chairman of Amnesty International USA, he has worked especially on international dimensions of those issues, including the U.S. administration's recourse to secret detention and coercive interrogation (including torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment).

In his professional life, he advises businesses on international, strategic, intellectual property, marketing, legal, and ethics matters. Formerly Chief Legal Officer of Nokia, Inc. and partner at a major global law firm, he is a Lecturer in Law at Stanford University Law School, has taught at other law schools and universities, and is a frequent speaker, writer, and commentator on ethical globalization, human rights, technology, and foreign affairs, including in national and international law journals, magazines, newspapers, and broadcast media. Among the publications with large numbers of subscribers for which he has written are the newspapers The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, and The Dallas Morning News, the magazines The American Prospect, The Nation, The New Republic, the Washington Spectator, The National Interest and Liberty Magazine. He has also provided commentaries for National Public Radio and Public Radio International.

Previously Treasurer as well as Chairman of the Amnesty International USA Board, he is also a leader of the corporate social responsibility movement, and currently serves on boards or advisory boards of the Center for Social Entrepreneurship and Accountability (University of Texas at Dallas), the ACLU of Dallas, the United Nations Association of Dallas, and the London-based Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. Pitts has worked in South Africa against apartheid, represented both the U.S. government and Amnesty International as well as other leading human rights and economic development organizations at the United Nations and international conferences, and provided pro bono representation to hundreds of victims of human rights abuses from all over the world, including especially women and children who are victims of trafficking and individuals seeking political asylum. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the Pacific Council on Foreign Policy in San Francisco, he is a long-time Amnesty International activist and remains a local group coordinator.