Wade McMullen is an experienced leader and human rights lawyer who has worked in service of grassroots activists and social justice movements for nearly two decades.

At Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Wade leads the organization’s strategy and its legal and educational programs that work with frontline advocates to topple systemic injustice and foster a new generation of human rights defenders. 

Wade has led the organization’s work on campaigns to free over 100 people from Rikers Island incarcerated on unaffordable money bail, establish TPS protections for Cameroonian migrants in the United States, prevent mass deportations of Haitians and their descendants in the Dominican Republic, secure labor rights for farmworkers in New York, rollback anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Uganda, and free prisoners of conscience from arbitrary detention around the globe.

As a litigator, Wade has argued high impact cases before human rights tribunals in Africa, Latin America, and the United Nations. His courtroom victories have led to the creation of nationwide measures to prevent gender-based violence in Guatemala, strengthened protections for the right to protest in Zimbabwe, and successfully challenged unfair elections in Ethiopia after the ruling coalition “won” 100% of the seats in parliament. He currently represents Lezley McSpadden before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights where she is seeking accountability for the 2014 murder of her son Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Wade’s work and commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, African Arguments, Americas Quarterly, and Al Jazeera, among others.

In 2019, Wade was the supervising attorney for the Civil and Human Rights Clinic at Howard University School of Law, and he co-directed the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law from 2015 to 2018. Wade is a current member of the Board of Directors of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. 

Raised in Texas, Wade now lives in Washington, DC. He received his J.D. from New York University School of Law and is licensed to practice law in the State of New York.