Edison Lanza is a former non-resident senior fellow with the Peter D. Bell Rule of Law at the Inter-American Dialogue. He is the Permanent Representative of Uruguay to the Organization of American States (OAS), where he heads Uruguay’s mission in Washington, DC. In 2024, Lanza served as Head of the OAS Electoral Observation Mission for Bolivia’s judicial elections.

He previously served as Secretary for International Relations and Institutional Affairs for the regional government of the Department of Canelones, Uruguay, and as a professor of journalism at the University of the Republic of Uruguay. Lanza also served as Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2014–2020). A lawyer and journalist, he has litigated freedom of expression cases at the national and regional levels and has worked as a journalist for several media outlets.

Lanza has co-founded and presided the Center for Archives and Access to Public Information (CAInfo), co-founded the Media and Society Group, has been a member of the Committee on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in the Regional Alliance for Freedom of Expression and Information, and of the Working Group on the Inter-American System of Human Rights of the OAS IFEX-ALC alliance in defense of freedom of expression. 

An Uruguayan lawyer, he graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of the Republic (Uruguay) in 1997. He pursued graduate studies on freedom of speech and criminal law at the same university and is a PhD candidate in the regulatory process of audiovisual media in Latin America at the University of Buenos Aires.