Matteo Mecacci, who was born in Florence, Italy, has served as a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (on its Foreign Affairs Committee) and as an elected official of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly.
Prior to taking up the Presidency of the International Campaign for Tibet, he supervised elections in Georgia as the Head of Mission for the OSCE/Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) at the Presidential Elections of 2013.
Mecacci was elected Chairperson of the Italian Parliamentary Intergroup for Tibet after being voted in as a Deputy for the Radical Party on the Democratic Party list at the 2008 general election. In November 2009, he organized the 5th World Parliamentarians Convention on Tibet in Rome, which hosted the Dalai Lama and established an International Network of Parliamentarians on Tibet. He became Co-Chair of the network with Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Thomas Mann in June 2010. Matteo has played an active role in promoting Tibetan democracy, and was a member of the Tibetan Election Observation Mission in March, 2011 – when the Tibetan community in exile undertook elections for the Central Tibetan Administration leadership.
Mecacci served as the representative of the Transnational Radical Party and No Peace Without Justice at the United Nations in New York from 2000 to 2008, where he coordinated various campaigns to foster democracy and protect human rights. He was part of a coalition of international NGOs advocating the reform of the United Nations – in particular the United Nations Commission on Human Rights – and he was one of the promoters of the International Steering Committee of the Community of Democracies.
He also played an important role in the international campaign that led in 2007 to the adoption of the first UN General Assembly resolution calling for a world moratorium of capital executions and the abolition of the death penalty, and assisted various countries in adhering to the Rome statute that established the International Criminal Court.
Mecacci was appointed Director of ODIHR in December 2020.
