Catherine Anite is the Senior Programme Officer, Media, Safety and Protection at ARTICLE 19 Eastern Africa. She previously worked with Danish Refugee Council, Association of Female Lawyers (FIDA) and Uganda Human Rights Commission. Currently, her focus as a human rights advocate is on freedom of expression and the media. From 2012 to 2015 she was Chief Legal Officer at the Human Rights Network for Journalists in Uganda, where she engaged in public interest litigation on free speech issues, represented journalists, pursued policy analysis, and spearheaded national and regional advocacy campaigns on behalf of journalists and other media practitioners. She successfully argued a case which created new jurisprudence on open justice for journalists in Uganda and is at the fore of litigation in the East African Court attempting to decriminalize defamation.  She has served as a senior judge at the International media law moot court at the University of Oxford, and received a Mandela Washington Fellowship from the U.S. State Department in 2014, where she studied civic leadership at the University of Delaware and attended President Obama’s summit for young African leaders in Washington D.C.  In 2016, she was a Legal Fellow at the Centre for Law and Democracy in Canada, and at the International Centre for Not for Profit Law in Washington D.C. She is also a researcher for the Global Freedom of Expression project at Columbia University.

Catherine earned an LLM in International Human Rights Law from Notre Dame University, USA graduating Magna Cum Laude, an LLB with honors from Makerere University, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice from the Law Development Centre, Kampala, Uganda.