Advance Awards Social Impact 2020 Category Finalist
To meet crisis day in and day out, Executive Director and CEO of Crisis Action, Andrew Hudson, relies on honesty, trust and inspiration. As an international human rights lawyer with 20 years of United Nations and international advocacy experience, Andrew brings world-class leadership to the global Crisis Action team and has spearheaded some of the organisation’s signature advocacy successes. Andrew sees crises as an opportunity to strengthen resolve and focuses on continually improving the organisation’s reach, impact and collaboration to better deal with impending global crises. Andrew has also globalized and diversified Crisis Action, while deliberately keeping their work behind the scenes. Previously, Andrew has worked with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Ecuador, the UN Regional Commission in Thailand, the Australian delegation to the UN General Assembly and the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions.
At the helm of Crisis Action, Andrew Hudson oversees 11 offices around the globe. The team works with a range of stakeholders including aid organisations, human rights organisations, business leaders, religious leaders, and governments to coordinate political responses to violent conflicts. Through Andrew’s time at Crisis Action, the organisation has focused on over 20 conflict-related crises and currently is involved in Syria, Yemen, and South Sudan. Some highlights of the collective impact Andrew has orchestrated through Crisis Action include helping: bring together Christian and Muslim religious leaders from Central African Republic to convince the UN to deploy a peacekeeping force, which stopped ethnic cleansing and saved thousands of lives; mobilise a global coalition that convinced the UN to send in world-first aid convoys to reach three million starving Syrians; to prevent an attack on a vital port in Yemen that enabled aid to continue to flow to tens of millions of people; secure accountability for the mass rape of hundreds of women and children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; ensure the independence of South Sudan was largely peaceful via a year-long global mobilisation campaign called Sudan365, which included a music video featuring Pink Floyd, The Police, Radiohead and more.
Andrew obtained a BA (Hons) (Political Science) and LLB (Hons) from University of Melbourne, then a Master of Laws (LLM) in Global Public Service Law from New York University, as a General Sir John Monash scholar.
