Bassam Khawaja is a Supervising Attorney and Lecturer in Law at the Smith Family Human Rights Clinic, where he directs projects on poverty, inequality, and climate justice. He previously worked as co-director of the Human Rights and Privatization Project at NYU Law School’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Senior Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, and for Human Rights Watch, where he was the Lebanon and Kuwait researcher in the Middle East and North Africa division and the Leonard H. Sandler Fellow in the children’s rights division. His work has focused on poverty and inequality, the human rights implications of privatization, refugee and migrant rights, torture, education, free speech, women’s rights, the right to health, and environmental rights. He received a BA from Macalester College and a JD from Columbia University, where he was a James Kent Scholar and Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. He is Counsel to the Human Rights and Privatization Project at NYU School of Law and sits on the Advisory Committee of the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch.