Mr. Andy Shen
BIOGRAPHY
Andy Shen is the Government & Multilateral Organizations Lead for the Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAST) initiative, a project based at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research.
An international human rights lawyer, Mr Shen has nearly a decade of experience in forced labour, human trafficking, and labour migration. He is an internationally recognized expert on human rights in industrial fisheries, and also has extensive experience on business & human rights and international labour standards. He began his human rights career at the Office of the Co-Prosecutors at the UN-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal.
Mr Shen previously worked with the International Labour Organization and the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) as a legal and policy adviser. At the ILO, he supported the Cambodian Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training in developing ministerial regulations that strengthened protection mechanisms and provided non-judicial remedy for Cambodian migrant workers. At the ILRF, he advised the Cotton Campaign, an international multi-stakeholder initiative dedicated to ending forced and child labour in cotton production, in its engagement with the World Bank Group on sustainable cotton initiatives in Uzbekistan.
He has also served as a legal consultant at a Cambodian anti-trafficking organization where he supported Cambodian lawyers who represented hundreds of survivors of labour trafficking. Most recently, he served as the human rights expert for Greenpeace’s global fisheries campaign. In this capacity, he represented Greenpeace in the Tariff Act Advisory Group, a small coalition of practitioners who have successfully used the US Tariff Act to prevent forced labour-produced goods from entering the US and are working to strengthen the law. He also represented Greenpeace in US legislative initiatives relating to modern slavery in global value chains.
Mr Shen holds a Juris Doctor from the Santa Clara University School of Law where he specialized in public international law, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is admitted to the New York Bar.