Amourlaye Touré

Amourlaye Touré is an international development professional with 20 years of experience on human rights, elections, good governance, and the environment. He worked as a Country Director for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and Freedom House in Niger, Togo, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda.

He is a founding member of the Ivorian Human Rights Movement (MIDH), which is a leading rights-based NGO in Cote d’Ivoire. As head of MIDH during the Ivorian civil war, Amourlaye was one of the most influential human rights activists in Cote d’Ivoire in the 2000. In a very difficult security situation, after the two first presidents of his organization fled into exile, his team was to document a huge number of human rights violations. Despite several threats reported by the FIDH in its annual report on the human rights defenders, he refused to go into exile and forced to live in hiding, sometimes. During his tenure as MIDH Director, Amourlaye was one of the main resource persons for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the FIDH (The International Federation for Human Rights). He worked on more than 400 investigations during the Ivorian crisis on issues ranging from rape, torture, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearance, and destruction of properties. This work was conducted in a very dangerous context during the peak of the civil war.

Amourlaye also participated in several sessions of the UN Commission of Human Rights in Geneva and of the African Commission of Human and People Rights in Banjul. During these sessions, he raised the issues of discrimination in the Ivorian Constitution and the serious human rights violations that will lead, several years later, to the civil war and its consequences.

After the Ivorian war and crisis, Amourlaye became the founder of the main Human Rights NGO coalition in Cote d’Ivoire: RAIDH (Coalition of the Ivorian Human rights defenders). The reason behind the creation of this coalition was to lesser the pressure on Amourlaye’s organization so that the documentation of the human rights violations could continue. A newsletter called “l’Appel” was also published to disseminate the violations and sensitize the decision makers at the national and international level.

As a consultant, Amourlaye has worked for Open Society Initiative, Amnesty International, the UNDP, NDI, IFES, Rights and Democracy, etc. in countries like Djibouti, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Benin, Kenya, Mali, Burkina Faso.

Amourlaye holds a Pre-Doctoral Diploma in Modern Literature from the University of Cocody, a Pre-Doctoral Diploma in Sociology from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Cote d’Ivoire, and graduated in Education sciences from the University of Montreal. In addition, he benefited some professional trainings mainly from Equitas, the International Pearson Peacekeeping Center, Inside NGO, and Frontline.

He is fluent in Bambara, French, and English, and conversational Spanish.