Mr. Jocelyn McCalla is the Executive Director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR), from which he took leave briefly in 2002-2003 to help develop the Kenya-based African Jesuits AIDS Network. He returned to the helm of the NCHR last November 2003.

Mr. McCalla has long been involved in international human rights and US policy analysis and advocacy, first as Associate Director of the NCHR from 1986-1988, and then from 1988 to March 2002 as the NCHR’s Executive Director. In that capacity, he became the leading advocate of human rights-based US policies toward Haitian refugees and immigrants and their motherland, testifying frequently before the US Congress, and working with a wide range of non-governmental organizations, US Government, UN and OAS officials to promote human rights in Haiti. Working with a broad grouping of key civil rights, labor, religious, immigrant and human rights advocates, NCHR led major efforts that resulted in 1986 and 1998 in legislative remedies that together allowed some 90,000 Haitian refugees to gain legal immigrant status in the US.

Under Mr. McCalla's leadership, the National Coalition for Haitian Rights has immersed itself in several campaigns and legal efforts to protect the rights of Haitian asylum-seekers under international and US law and to promote human rights and democratic governance in Haiti. As part of such efforts, Mr. McCalla launched Haiti Insight, a monthly news bulletin that quickly became a key resource for the media, advocates, lawyers, asylum officers, policymakers and lawmakers concerned with developments in Haiti. In 1991, NCHR deepened its commitment to human rights in Haiti by opening up a field office that, in addition to human rights reporting and promotion, trained Haitian human rights advocates and informed the work of the UN Human Rights Mission in Haiti (MICIVIH). NCHR’s office in Haiti is today the country’s leading human rights voice. In 1995, Mr. McCalla re-engineered NCHR as the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, shifting the organization’s focus from a refugee-protection agenda to a broader [US] domestic rights agenda.

During his tenure as NCHR’s Executive Director, Mr. McCalla has helped inform and been featured in network and cable news broadcasts, including the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, ABC News Nightline, WNBC's the Today Show, The Charley Rose Show, Positively Black, The McCreary Report, CNN, etc. Similarly Mr. McCalla has also helped inform news and editorials printed in the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Newsday, the NY Post, the New York Daily News, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe among others.

He has edited, authored or co-authored several reports on human rights conditions in Haiti. These include, among others:

• Restavèk No More: Eliminating Child Slavery in Haiti (April 2002: co-author)
• The Odyssey of Haitian Refugees (1995: author)
• Beyond the Bateyes: Haitian Immigrants in the Dominican Republic (1995: editor)
• The Haitian Refugee Crisis: Origins, Causes and Responses (1991: author);
• Haiti: Justice Emprisoned (1991: author);
• In the Army's Hands: Human Rights in Haiti on the eve of the Elections (1990: co-author, editor);
• Haiti: Tormented Country (in French), (1990: co-author);
• Haiti, Ruined Land: Ecology and Dictatorship (in French) (1990: co-author);
• Reverting to Despotism: Human Rights in Haiti (1990: co-author, editor);
• Haitian Sugar Cane Cutters in the Dominican Republic (1989: editor);
• Human Rights in Haiti: One Year under General Prosper Avril (1989: editor);
• The More things Change... Human Rights in Haiti (1989: co-author);
• Haiti: Terror and the 1987 Elections (1987: co-author);
• Haiti: Duvalierism Since Duvalier (1986: co-author)

He is a member of the Board of Human Rights Watch/Americas, the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network and the NY-based Consortium for Haitian Empowerment.