STEVE CRAWSHAW has been London director of Human Rights Watch since 2002.

Before that he worked for many years as a journalist with The Independent, including as Germany bureau chief, chief foreign correspondent, foreign news editor and senior editorial-writer. He reported especially from Russia, eastern Europe and the Balkans, including the east European revolutions, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Balkan wars and the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. He is the author of Goodbye to the USSR (1992), and of Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century (2004)