Zuzana Aimaq-Fialova, Executive Director

Zuzana Aimaq-Fialová was born in 1972. She graduated from sociology at the Commenius University Bratislava, Faculty of Philosophy. Later she studied at the Graduate School for Social Research in Warsaw, and received her Ph.D. in the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw.

She had been working in the FOCUS agency as a researcher specializing on the issues of civil society, political culture and national minorities. Several publications on the topics appeared as a result of her work. In 1997-2003 she had been living and working in Warsaw, in Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. There she was leading and co-authoring a program Human Rights Training Center, which was focused on training practical skills for defending and implementing human rights. The Center conducted training programs especially for recipients from the countries of former Soviet Union (both representatives of the state institutions and civil society). Training curricula covered e.g.: human rights monitoring, civic campaigning, public interest law, strategic planning, peaceful conflict resolution, methods of human rights education).

Together with her own team of specialized experts she conducted dozens of training sessions and consultations in almost 20 countries of Europe and Asia. She also assisted in implementing several research projects in the field of human rights in those countries (e.g. human rights monitoring in the psychiatric hospitals in the Russian Federation), as well as in Poland itself (e.g. monitoring of district courts, human rights and the police, access to justice, etc.).

In 2004-2006 she had been working in Afghanistan. First, it was a mission of the civilian advisor (for human rights and civil society issues) to the German Provincial Reconstruction Team ISAF-NATO in Kunduz (North-East Region). Later she had been contracted as a consultant for human rights, gender, and civil society in a German development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ). She conducted several training and education projects for local intelligentsia, teachers, and community mobilizers. She consulted local agencies (e.g. Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission) and, last but not least, also direct advocacy work in cases of extreme human rights violations. Working for GTZ she drafted and started to implement a strategy of work on the development of women’s non-governmental organizations. She got an opportunity to held an expert speech about her fieldwork experience on the North-Atlantic Council session in June 2005.

In Slovakia she has been working as an independent consultant for human rights, international security and development aid. Ministries of foreign affairs, defence, and interior belong to her clients, as well as UN agencies and Slovak non-governmental organizations and think-tanks. She has been, for example, a team leader of experts conducting research on human trafficking in SR on request of the UN Office for Drugs and Crime. Besides professional publications, she wrote several popular press articles on human rights and development aid. More