Jonathan Hutson serves as NACDL’s Senior Director for Public Affairs and Communications. Jonathan earned his law degree from New York University School of Law, and a Master’s in French Literature from Michigan State University. Jonathan brings 20 years of experience managing strategic communications for high-profile organizations and causes, such as the Public Justice, Physicians for Human Rights, Public Justice, the Enough Project, and #ISurvivedEbola.
Jonathan served as the architect of George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel Project, or SSP, the world’s first early warning system for human rights and human security. He forged a series of SSP partnerships that included Google, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the Enough Project at the Center for American Progress, DigitalGlobe (now Maxar), and Internet strategy firm Trellon. He built a network of confidential sources on the ground in Sudanese conflict zones where the U.N., reporters, and humanitarian groups could not go. The pairing of remote satellite image-gathering capacity with on-the-ground reporting and camerawork created unprecedented documentation of mass graves and atrocities that reached the highest levels of government, the U.N. Security Council, and the International Criminal Court, and were reported and broadcast around the world.
In August and September 2021, Jonathan visited four refugee camps in eastern Sudan, where he interviewed people from five ethnic groups who had fled the ongoing genocide in Tigray. Based on his field research, corroborated by photos, video, and satellite imagery, he broke the news in a piece for Salon.com that Ethiopia had created concentration camps in Western Tigray, and had tortured, starved, and abused children of all ages in these camps.
He has spoken before international audiences at the invitation of the White House, the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research, the U.S. Mission to the U.N., the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, UC-Berkeley’s Soul of the New Machine conference, SXSW Interactive 2013, the Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights, the World Learning Center, USAID’s Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Forum, hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the APEC Pathfinder III dialogue in Lima, Peru.
Jonathan's TV appearances include Al Jazeera, AJE, BBC, CBC, CBN, Channel 4 (UK), CNN, CNN International, CTV News (Canada), ITN Channel 3 (UK), PBS “Newshour,” South African Broadcasting Corporation, “Weekend Today” (Australia), and Sky News. His radio interviews include BBC World News, BBC Radio 5 Live, NPR’s "All Things Considered" and “On the Media,” New Hampshire Public Radio, Pacifica Radio Network, Radio Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale, and Voice of America. He is quoted in major print outlets, such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Foreign Policy, Global Brief, The Guardian (UK), USA Today, Washington Post, and WIRED UK.
Jonathan has authored pieces on human rights, race, and the law, which have appeared in diverse outlets, such as Salon.com, Foreign Policy, and The European.
