Miklós Haraszti is a Hungarian author, professor, and human rights promoter. He was a founder of Hungary’s human rights and free press movement in the 1970s, and a member of Parliament in the 1990s.

From 2004 to 2010, he was appointed to serve as representative on freedom of the media with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.). He has headed several election observation missions for the O.S.C.E.’s monitoring arm, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (O.D.I.H.R.) Since 2012, he has been the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Belarus.

He has taught at several universities, including Columbia University, New York, and Central European University (CEU), Budapest. He is a fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society at CEU School of Public Policy, and director of research on human rights at CEU’s Center for European Neighborhood Studies.

He has published widely and is frequently invited to comment in the international media. His books include “A Worker in a Worker’s State,” and “The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism.” He co-authored “Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace” in 2010.