Human rights have been a fascination for me since my early twenties. In 1972, I met political prisoners in West Java, Indonesia, and that has fed my interest and activities through the years. It got under my skin and never left me.

We visited a holiday resort in Batukuwung, simple bamboo cottages and sulphurous springs, a pasar malam and flying dogs at sunset, no electricity and fireflies at night. Super romantic! Next morning we turned out to be the only visitors and started our exploration in the park. A gardener told us about the other side. He was one of the many political prisoners who worked in the park as convicts. The park was the property of the local (Siliwangi)  army division commander. The workers only got a meal and a krètèk cigarette a day and a piece of soap every month. Our rent was the military's profit. We asked why he did not just leave. The park had no fences. He laughed at our naïvety. He did not have a clean ID, so the whole country was his prison, like hundreds of thousands of other "tapols".

Since then I have been active in different organisations, like Amnesty International and Aim for human rights. I upgraded my knowledge on human rights law and visited many more countries. Now that I approach the age of retirement, I want to make use of my experience in assignments that can serve others to become more effective in realising human rights.

You can view a summary of my Curriculum Vitae here, or click to the complete CV here. You can read a background paper on human rights in general here. There is also my book on impunity in Indoensia that I wrote during a sabbatical period in 2005: The Scope of Impunity. And the tool I developed to facilitate measurement of progress in human rights on the ground, you can find here.