Maina Kiai is a co-director of InformAction, a non-profit organization based in Nairobi, Kenya.

From 2011 to 2017, Kiai served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association. As the inaugural UN Special Rapporteur for his issue, Kiai developed a strong mandate that brought the voices of civil society to the forefront and defended democratic space in an increasingly hostile international environment. Concurrently, he continued to lead InformAction, an organization he founded with the goal of using the power of film to engage and activate everyday citizens in Kenya. His most recent film, “Guidebook to Impunity” focused on the serious crisis of credibility in Kenya brought by the elections fo 2013, the ending of the Kenya cases at the International Criminal Court, and the weaknesses of the Supreme Court of Kenya dealing with election petitions after the 2013 elections. The film has been viewed by 300,000 people through public screenings and DVDs.

Kiai also founded and served as the executive director of the nongovernmental Kenya Human Rights Commission between 1992 and 1998, and later as the first chairman of Kenya’s National Human Rights Commission from 2003-2008.

Kiai worked in London as the director of Amnesty International’s Africa Program and in the United States as director of the International Human Rights Law Group’s Africa Program. He has held research fellowships at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the TransAfrica Forum in Washington DC.

Kiai was named Jurist of the Year in 2005 by the International Commission of Jurists. In 2014, Freedom House awarded him their Freedom Award and in 2016, AFL-CIO and UN Association gave him their highest honor for his work as UN Special Rapporteur.

At the Eighth Assembly, Kiai explained how assaults on democracy manifest.