Through the Smith Family Human Rights Clinic Mentorship Program (launched in 2014), each clinical student is connected to a mentor drawn from the global community of practicing human rights advocates. Each mentor has roughly three to ten years of practice experience in a diversity of human rights–related work areas, and is selected for their interest and skills in mentorship. Mentors provide personal and career guidance throughout the year that the students participate in the clinic. The Mentorship Program is intended to foster a supportive environment for students’ human rights practice while simultaneously increasing practitioner links to new allies and advocates, to grow professional networks in the human rights field, to increase student exposure to diverse professional influences and the range of types of work undertaken in the human rights field, and to provide mentors additional opportunities to influence the development of new generations of advocates.

New Mentors Participating in 2021–2022

Yasmine Chubin

Yasmine Chubin is the Legal Advocacy Director for the Foundation’s Docket initiative. She is also a Harvard Law School Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow. Previously Chubin was a Trial Lawyer in the Office of the Prosecutor of both the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and a Legal Officer to the International Co-Investigating Judge of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. She has also consulted as an independent human rights lawyer for a number of organizations, including The Sentry, a CFJ strategic partner, the International Development Law Organization, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the International Commission of Jurists, the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, Diakonia, the OSACO Group, and Rwanda’s National Public Prosecution Authority. Ms. Chubin also served as a UN Expert in prosecutions and investigations for the Special Criminal Court in the Central African Republic. She started her legal career as an Associate at Shearman & Sterling LLP and holds degrees from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and from the University of Michigan Law School, where she served as the Managing Editor of the Michigan Law Review. She is fluent in English, French, and Farsi.

Benjamin Hoffman

Benjamin Hoffman first joined EarthRights in 2011, spending three years in the Amazon office in Lima, Peru, providing litigation support to communities from the Andean-Amazonian region resisting the harmful consequences of resource extraction and mega-development projects. Through this work, Hoffman contributed to EarthRights’ goal of better integrating community collaboration and co-empowerment in human rights advocacy strategies and methodology; he is the co-author of several law review articles on the topic. He then worked for five years co-teaching the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic, continuing his work to disrupt global corporate-community power imbalances in the business and human rights field, including in the context of workers’ rights advocacy. For his contributions to the law school, he received the 2016 Faculty Honors Award from the Columbia Society of International Law. In 2019, Hoffman rejoined EarthRights as a Supervising Attorney. 

Benjamin Hoffman his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he received the Dean’s Award for Community Leadership for his work in the area of human rights. While in law school, he worked with Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, as an Ella Baker Fellow with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and as a human rights fellow with the Colombian NGO DeJuSticia.

He is admitted to practice law in New York and the District of Columbia.

Meera Shah

Meera Shah joined Palestine Legal in 2019. She supports the organization’s casework and public education and oversees the advocacy work on free speech, academic freedom, and the right to boycott.

She has devoted her career to advancing human rights and social justice for marginalized communities. Before joining Palestine Legal, Shah was a Senior Legal Advisor at the Center for Reproductive Rights, where she helped launch a program to ensure the sexual and reproductive rights of women and girls affected by conflict. Prior to that, she supervised law students via teaching fellowships at the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School. 

In partnership with local human rights organizations and advocates, she supervised fact-finding, research, and advocacy projects related to human rights violations in Israel/Palestine and arising out of the Syrian refugee crisis. She clerked for Judge Andre Davis of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Baltimore, Maryland.

She earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a James Kent Scholar, served as an articles editor for the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and interned for the Center for Constitutional Rights. She also holds an M.A. in Arab studies from Georgetown University and a B.A. in international relations from Stanford University. Before law school, she worked as a media coordinator for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and spent two years living in Palestine, studying Arabic and working as a journalist during the Second Intifada.

She is based in Palestine Legal’s New York City office and is admitted to the New York state bar.

Naureen Shah

Naureen Shah (@naureenshah) is a senior policy and advocacy counsel on immigrants’ rights with the ACLU. She is a human rights lawyer with history as a strategist, lobbyist, researcher and campaigner. Previously she was senior director of campaigns at the US section of Amnesty International and a lobbyist at the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. She has lobbied Congress, the White House, federal agencies, the UN, EU, foreign governments and regional human rights bodies. She is the author of several reports and commentaries on human rights, detention, torture and national security. She has collaborated with and trained grassroots activists across the country. She holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School and a B.S. from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Amanda Klasing

Amanda Klasing is the interim co-director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Her work focuses on sexual and domestic violence, reproductive rights and women's health, indigenous rights, and economic and social rights. She is a specialist in the rights to water and sanitation.

Klasing has carried out research and advocacy on a number of human rights issues, including: the First Nations water crisis in Canada; the rights of women and girls in affected by Zika in Brazil and in Haiti after the earthquake; sexual violence and other forms of violence against women displaced by conflict in Colombia; accountability for victims of former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti; the relationship between women’s and girls’ human rights and access to good menstrual hygiene management; and the rights to water and sanitation in schools. Amanda has also researched and analyzed the women’s rights impacts of the 2016 US Election, including the restrictions on women's reproductive health and rights in the US and abroad, threats to protections for survivors of gender-based violence and efforts to decrease women's access to health care. 

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Klasing’s work included indigenous rights and development in Mexico, indigenous women’s role in transitional justice in Peru, and Dalit rights in India. She has also worked more broadly on immigrant rights in the United States and economic, social, and cultural rights, with a focus on the rights to water and food in Haiti.

Klasing published in peer-reviewed journals on the right to water and on human rights and humanitarian response and is a contributing author of an academic book on health and human rights. She has spoken before United Nations human rights bodies. Her op-eds have run in Jurist, CNN, The Globe and Mail, the Huffington Post and other outlets. She has made radio and TV appearances on outlets including the BBC, Voice of America, CCTV, and CNN Spanish. She is a founding member of the Human Rights Methodology Lab.

Klasing holds a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago, and a law degree from New York University, where she received the Vanderbilt Medal for outstanding contributions to the Law School.

Amrit Singh 

Amrit Singh is a human rights lawyer and director at the Open Society Justice Initiative. Singh conducts strategic litigation and advocacy directed at accountability for human rights abuses, and oversees projects on international justice, national security and counterterrorism, and anticorruption. Among other cases, she is counsel in Open Society Justice Initiative v. CIA, a lawsuit seeking disclosure of U.S. government records relating to the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Singh has also successfully litigated the European Court of Human Rights cases al Nashiri v. Poland and al Nashiri v. Romania, which challenged these countries’ hosting of secret CIA prisons. She is the author of Eroding Trust, Death by Drone, and Globalizing Torture, and is the co-author of Administration of Torture. She is also an adjunct professor at NYU law school.

Before joining the Justice Initiative, Singh was a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, litigating immigrants’ rights and national security cases, including landmark litigation that exposed Bush administration torture policies. She was a law clerk to Judge Cedarbaum of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, Oxford University, and Cambridge University.

Chris Rogers

Chris Rogers (@ChristphrRogers) is a senior program officer with the Open Society Human Rights Initiative leading its work on Security and Rights. Prior to joining the Human Rights Initiative, Rogers was senior policy analyst with the Open Society’s Middle East North Africa/Southwest Asia Program, where he conducted advocacy, research and grant making with Open Society  partners in the region.

An expert on international law, human rights, and conflict, he has published reports on counter-terrorism operations and policy, the use of armed drones, unlawful detention and torture, insurgent abuse, and the protection of civilians. Prior to joining the Open Society Foundations, Rogers was a researcher for the Center for Civilians in Conflict based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, investigating civilian casualties from military operations and terrorism. He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.Phil. in international development from Oxford University, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.
 

Kingsley Abbott

Kingsley Abbott joined the ICJ in January 2014. He works under the Legal and Policy Office and is based in the Asia & Pacific Regional Office in Bangkok, Thailand. He worked for the United Nations as a Senior Legal Officer at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia and a Trial Counsel in the Office of the Prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in the Hague. He also practiced as a criminal barrister in New Zealand, where he worked alongside a leading Queens Counsel, appearing in the District Court, High Court and Court of Appeal on numerous matters for both the defense and prosecution, including several trials where the charge was murder. He was admitted to the New Zealand Bar in 2002 and holds a conjoint degree in law and philosophy from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
 

Nathalie Weizmann

Nathalie Weizmann (@nweizmann) is Senior Legal Officer with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, where her work focuses on International Humanitarian Law as it relates to the protection of civilians and humanitarian activities. Before joining the U.N., Weizmann was Senior Director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, carrying out research and writing on legal and policy issues relating to U.S. national security, IHL and international human rights law. Earlier, she was a legal adviser with the International Committee of the Red Cross, both at Geneva headquarters and in the field, examining issues ranging from judicial guarantees and procedural safeguards of persons deprived of their liberty, to autonomous weapons and responsible arms transfers, and representing the ICRC in Arms Trade Treaty negotiations. She has also worked for various human rights NGOs, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and in private legal practice with Ogilvy Renault (now Norton Rose Fulbright) in Canada.

Weizmann is a graduate of McGill University’s Faculty of Science and Faculty of Law, and of the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Current and Prior Clinic Mentors

Benjamin Hoffman, Supervising Attorney, EarthRights International 

Benjamin first joined EarthRights in 2011, spending three years in the Amazon office in Lima, Peru, providing litigation support to communities from the Andean-Amazonian region resisting the harmful consequences of resource extraction and mega-development projects. Through this work, Benjamin contributed to EarthRights’ goal of better integrating community collaboration and co-empowerment in human rights advocacy strategies and methodology; he is the co-author of several law review articles on the topic. He then worked for five years co-teaching the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic, continuing his work to disrupt global corporate-community power imbalances in the business and human rights field, including in the context of workers’ rights advocacy. For his contributions to the law school, he received the 2016 Faculty Honors Award from the Columbia Society of International Law. In 2019, Benjamin rejoined EarthRights as a Supervising Attorney. Benjamin received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he received the Dean’s Award for Community Leadership for his work in the area of human rights. While in law school, he worked with Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, as an Ella Baker Fellow with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and as a human rights fellow with the Colombian NGO DeJuSticia. He is admitted to practice law in New York and the District of Columbia.

Yasmin Dagne, Cochran Fellow, Neufeld Scheck & Brustbein LLP 

Yasmin joined Neufeld Scheck & Brustin LLP as a Cochran Fellow in 2019. She comes to NSB from Human Rights Watch (HRW), where she was the Leonard H. Sandler Fellow. At HRW, she led an investigation of a billion-dollar hydroelectric dam in Guinea dispossessing thousands of peasant farmers. While at Columbia Law School, Yasmin was a member of the Human Rights Clinic and part of a team that conducted a landmark forensic investigation of war crimes committed by international peacekeepers who had murdered civilians and dumped their bodies in a mass grave in the Central African Republic. She has interned for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the United States District Court of the District of Columbia and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she worked to challenge a voter ID law that disproportionately impacted poor and Black residents of Alabama. Yasmin was also an Academic Chair of the Black Law Student Association, whose class voted to award her the Academic Achievement Award in 2018, and a member of the Frederick Douglass Moot Court team, where she and her partner were awarded Best Respondent Brief in the Northeast region. She received her BA from Princeton University and her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law.

Michael Tan, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project 

Michael Tan is a Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project (IRP). His practice includes litigation and advocacy relating to immigration detention, immigrants’ access to education, and the rights of undocumented young people. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Yale Law School and also holds a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from New York University. After law school, Michael clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked at IRP as Skadden Fellow and a Liman Public Interest Fellow. In 2014, he was awarded a California Lawyer of the Year Award in Immigration Law for his work on Rodriguez v. Robbins, a class action lawsuit challenging the prolonged detention of immigrants without bond hearings. Michael was awarded a Best Lawyers Under 40 Award by the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association in 2016, and was also named a Best LGBT Lawyer Under the Age of 40 by the National LGBT Bar Association in 2017.

Wendy Isaack, Researcher, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program, HRW

Wendy Isaack is a researcher in the LGBT rights program at Human Rights Watch. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Wendy worked as Adjunct Professor at the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic, City University of New York (CUNY) and as an international consultant for UN Women, Palestine Office where she produced a report titled International Legal Accountability Mechanisms: Palestinian Women Living under occupation. Wendy served as Human Rights Specialist at UN Women, providing policy support in respect of intergovernmental processes in New York and Geneva, responsible for providing technical support to the CEDAW Committee in its elaboration of General Recommendation No. 30 on the protection of women’s human rights in conflict and post-conflict contexts. A lawyer by training, she has worked for public interest litigation organizations in South Africa, the Legal Resources Centre and Centre for Applied Legal Studies, and a women’s rights organization, People Opposing Women Abuse. From 2000 – 2005, Wendy was the coordinator of the legal advice centre at the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project, the leading LGBT legal advocacy organization in South Africa at the time. In February 2020, Wendy returned to Human Rights Watch after taking up a temporary position for one year at the UN as Programme Officer in the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Wendy was responsible for preparing the 2019 annual report of the UN Secretary-General on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence covering 19 country situations, including a list of parties credibly suspected of committing or being responsible for acts of rape or other forms of sexual violence in situations of armed conflict on the agenda of the Security Council. Wendy holds a master’s degree in Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a master’s degree in International Law with a focus on Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland.

Meera Shah, Senior Staff Attorney, Palestine Legal 

Meera Shah joined Palestine Legal in 2019. She supports the organization’s casework and public education and oversees the advocacy work on free speech, academic freedom, and the right to boycott. Meera has devoted her career to advancing human rights and social justice for marginalized communities. Before joining Palestine Legal, Meera was a Senior Legal Advisor at the Center for Reproductive Rights, where she helped launch a program to ensure the sexual and reproductive rights of women and girls affected by conflict. Prior to that, she supervised law students via teaching fellowships at the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School. In partnership with local human rights organizations and advocates, she supervised fact-finding, research, and advocacy projects related to human rights violations in Israel/Palestine and arising out of the Syrian refugee crisis. She clerked for Judge Andre Davis of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Baltimore, Maryland. Meera earned her JD from Columbia Law School where she was a James Kent Scholar, served as an articles editor for the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and interned for the Center for Constitutional Rights. She also holds a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in international relations from Stanford University. Before law school, she worked as a media coordinator for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and spent two years living in Palestine, studying Arabic and working as a journalist during the Second Intifada. She is based in Palestine Legal’s New York City office and is admitted to the New York state bar.

Rahma Hussein, Legal Fellow, Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights Project, Columbia Law School 

Rahma A. Hussein, is a lawyer specializing in international human rights and international criminal law. Prior to joining Columbia Law School’s Project on Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights, Rahma worked at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights (RFKHR) where she was responsible for RFKHR’s litigation and advocacy case work in the Sub-Saharan Africa region. This included engaging in all stages of the proceedings before the African Court and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in cases involving civic and political participation. Rahma has also worked as a Deans Fellow for Professor Diane Orentlicher at American University Washington College of Law conducting research on transitional justice issues, as a Research Fellow for the War Crimes Research Office, in the Legal Vice Presidency Group at the World Bank, the Center for Justice and Accountability, and Human Rights First. Prior to law school, Rahma served for over two years as Project Coordinator and Legal Investigator with African Rights in Kigali Rwanda, where she worked with victims and survivors of the Rwandan genocide, collaborated with international and local prosecutors, and consulted with the UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science and international studies from the University of Chicago. She is fluent in Somali, and has advanced proficiency in French. Rahma is admitted to practice law in the state of New York.

Amanda Klasing, Interim Co-Director, Women’s Rights Division, Human Rights Watch

Amanda Klasing is the interim co-director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Her work focuses on sexual and domestic violence, reproductive rights and women's health, indigenous rights, and economic and social rights. She is a specialist in the rights to water and sanitation. Amanda has carried out research and advocacy on a number of human rights issues including: the First Nations water crisis in Canada; the rights of women and girls in affected by Zika in Brazil and in Haiti after the earthquake; sexual violence and other forms of violence against women displaced by conflict in Colombia; accountability for victims of former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti; the relationship between women’s and girls’ human rights and access to good menstrual hygiene management; and the rights to water and sanitation in schools. Amanda has also researched and analyzed the women’s rights impacts of the 2016 US Election, including the restrictions on women's reproductive health and rights in the US and abroad, threats to protections for survivors of gender-based violence and efforts to decrease women's access to health care. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Amanda’s work included indigenous rights and development in Mexico, indigenous women’s role in transitional justice in Peru, and Dalit rights in India. She has also worked more broadly on immigrant rights in the United States and economic, social, and cultural rights, with a focus on the rights to water and food in Haiti. Amanda published in peer-reviewed journals on the right to water and on human rights and humanitarian response and is a contributing author of an academic book on health and human rights. She has spoken before United Nations human rights bodies. Her op-eds have run in Jurist, CNN, The Globe and Mail, the Huffington Post and other outlets. She has made radio and TV appearances on outlets including the BBC, Voice of America, CCTV, and CNN Spanish. She is a founding member of the Human Rights Methodology Lab. Amanda holds a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago, and a law degree from New York University, where she received the Vanderbilt Medal for outstanding contributions to the Law School.

Jehanne Henry, Senior Researcher, Human Rights Watch

Jehanne Henry is an independent consultant on human rights and international justice issues currently working with the ministry of justice in Sudan’s transitional government. Until October 2020, she was associate director in Human Rights Watch’s Africa division superving the organization’s work on East Africa. She joined Human Rights Watch in late 2007, focusing initially on the conflict in Darfur, then on a range of other issues in Sudan and South Sudan and neighboring countries. 

Henry previously served as a human rights officer with the United Nations Mission in Sudan, based in North Darfur; with USAID on human rights and rule of law issues in Cambodia; as a legal adviser in the United Nations Mission in Kosovo; and as a legal aid program manager with the American Refugee Committee in Kosovo. She has also worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, and clerked for a U.S. federal judge in New York. 

Henry has taught advanced seminars on human rights topics at Hunter College’s Human Rights Program, participated in numerous public speaking events and made regular media appearances on behalf of Human Rights Watch. Prior to becoming a lawyer, Henry wrote and edited for magazines in Egypt and California. 

Esha Bhandari, Deputy Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

Esha Bhandari is deputy director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, where she works on litigation and advocacy to protect freedom of expression and privacy rights in the digital age. She also focuses on the impact of big data and artificial intelligence on civil liberties. She has litigated cases including Sandvig v. Barr, a First Amendment challenge to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on behalf of researchers who test for housing and employment discrimination online, and Alasaad v. Wolf, a challenge to suspicionless electronic device searches at the U.S. border. Esha was previously a senior staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Projec. Before that, she was an Equal Justice Works fellow with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, where she was involved in litigating cases concerning a right to counsel in immigration proceedings and immigration detainer policies. Esha is a graduate of McGill University, where she was a Loran Scholar and received the Allen Oliver Gold Medal in Political Science, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Columbia Law School. She served as a law clerk to the Hon. Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Chris Albin Lackey, Legal & Policy Director, National Center for Access to Justice, Fordham Law School 

Chris Albin-Lackey, Legal & Policy Director at the National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham Law School, helps to guide all of NCAJ’s activities. In particular, he is helping to develop the Fines & Fees Initiative, which will incorporate into NCAJ’s Justice Index a set of best policies for controlling excessive fines, fees and court costs. Prior to joining NCAJ, Chris was Senior Legal Advisor with Human Rights Watch, where he helped shape, edit and vet a substantial part of the organization’s research and advocacy, including its work on the United States. He also worked for more than ten years as a Human Rights Watch researcher and associate director, carrying out research and high-level advocacy on a range of domestic and international human rights problems, and authoring more than a dozen Human Rights Watch reports. These included Rubber Stamp Justice: US Courts, Debt Buying Corporations and the Poor, detailing how state and local courts facilitate the debt buying industry’s efforts to turn them into default judgment mills on a massive scale, and Profiting From Probation: America’s Offender-Funded Probation Industry, examining how courts in several states turned to for-profit “offender-funded” probation companies to boost collection of court debt. Chris also carried out Human Rights Watch research and advocacy on business and human rights issues including abuses linked to mining operations in Papua New Guinea, India and elsewhere, and worked for several years covering Nigeria and the Horn of Africa for Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division. Chris lived in Ethiopia and Madagascar as a Peace Corps volunteer. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy from Boston University and a JD from Columbia Law School.

Kingsley Abbott, Senior Legal Advisor, Global Redress and Accountability, International Commission of Jurists 

Kingsley Abbott joined the ICJ in January 2014. He works under the Legal and Policy Office and is based in the Asia & Pacific Regional Office in Bangkok, Thailand. He worked for the United Nations as a Senior Legal Officer at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia and a Trial Counsel in the Office of the Prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in the Hague. He also practiced as a criminal barrister in New Zealand where he worked alongside a leading Queens Counsel, appearing in the District Court, High Court and Court of Appeal on numerous matters for both the defence and prosecution including several trials where the charge was murder. He was admitted to the New Zealand Bar in 2002 and holds a conjoint degree in law and philosophy from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Jonathan Kaufman, Executive Director, Advocates for Community Alternatives

Prior to founding ACA, Jonathan was Legal Advocacy Coordinator at EarthRights International, where he worked with civil society groups and communities on six continents to promote accountability for corporate complicity in human rights abuse and environmental devastation. He was a Finalist for the Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Award in 2010, and has served as an adviser to the U.S. State Department on dispute resolution between communities and corporations. Jonathan graduated from Yale University with a combined B.A. and M.A. in Chinese, studied law at Harvard Law School, and has a degree in public policy from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan in 2002-03 and speaks Mandarin Chinese, French, and Spanish.

Paola Garcia Rey, Adjunct Director, Amnesty International Argentina 

She is a lawyer and graduated with honors from the Law School of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), specializing in Public International Law, in 2004. She also completed a Master of Laws (LLM) in 2010 at the Columbia University Law School in New York City. She worked for five years at the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), as a lawyer in the International Litigation Area, making use of the legal tool as a way to advance structural reforms to prevent violations of human rights (civil, political, economic, social and cultural). She was also coordinator of the Human Rights Area and the Inter-American Human Rights System of the Human Rights Institute of Columbia University in New York, where she led advocacy actions and litigation of cases before the Inter-American Human Rights System. She has been a consultant for the Network on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in NY, for UNICEF-NY, in the Migrants Area. In Argentina, she was a member of the Human Rights Center of the University of Lanús. She was a consultant in the Public Ministry of Defense in Argentina and in the Institute of Public Policies and Human Rights (IPPDH) of MERCOSUR, in matters of public policies and human rights, ESCR and juvenile criminal justice. Since June 2012 she has been the Director of Protection and Promotion of Human Rights at Amnesty International Argentina.

Sirine Shebaya, Executive Director, National Immigration Project 

Executive Director Sirine Shebaya is a longtime immigrant rights advocate who focuses on combining litigation and public campaign strategies to defend and advance the rights of immigrant communities of color. She has litigated several high-profile cases alongside and on behalf of communities impacted by the Muslim Ban, family separation, discriminatory police practices, and immigration detention and enforcement. In partnership with local community groups, she led a campaign that resulted in eliminating ICE holds in most jurisdictions in Maryland. Sirine’s work advancing and defending immigrant rights has earned her numerous awards. She previously worked at the ACLU of Maryland and the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition. She is very excited to be leading NIPNLG into its next chapter in the fight for immigrant justice.

Kingsley Abbott, International Commission of Jurists

@AbbottKingsley

Kingsley Abbott is based in Bangkok, Thailand, as the Senior Legal Adviser for Global Accountability at the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ).  He is actively engaged in advocacy and policy work at the national, regional and international levels aimed at strengthening the role of governments, lawyers and judges to protect and promote human rights through the rule of law. Before joining the ICJ in January 2014, he was a Senior Legal Officer with the United Nations at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia where he advised judges investigating international and domestic crimes allegedly committed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. He also worked as a Trial Counsel with the Office of the Prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in the Hague, Netherlands, which was the first international tribunal established to prosecute terrorism. Prior to working as an international criminal lawyer, he spent several years practicing as a barrister in New Zealand with a leading Queen’s Counsel where he acted for both the defense and prosecution. He holds degrees in law and philosophy from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Alex Abdo, American Civil Liberties Union
@AlexanderAbdo

Alex Abdo is a Staff Attorney in the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. He is counsel in the ACLU’s lawsuit challenging the NSA’s phone-records program. He has been involved in the litigation of cases concerning the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the treatment of detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Navy brig in South Carolina. Mr. Abdo is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. Prior to working at the ACLU, he served as a law clerk to the Hon. Barbara M.G. Lynn, United States District Judge for the Northern District of Texas, and to the Hon. Rosemary Barkett, United States Circuit Judge for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Chris Albin Lackey, Human Rights Watch 
@calbinlackey

Chris Albin-Lackey is a senior researcher in the Business and Human Rights Program. He carries out research and advocacy work on the human rights impacts of businesses as well as on the human rights impact of corruption in resource-rich countries.  From 2008 until 2010, Albin-Lackey was a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch's Africa Division specializing on the Horn of Africa and Kenya. Prior to that, he was the Nigeria researcher at Human Rights Watch, focusing on issues including local government corruption in the oil-producing Niger Delta; abuses connected to Nigeria's 2007 elections; and government discrimination against "non-indigene" populations across Nigeria. He also worked as a fellow for Human Rights Watch, covering Ethiopia in the run-up to that country's controversial 2005 elections. Chris lived in Ethiopia and Madagascar as a Peace Corps volunteer before joining the organization. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy from Boston University and a JD from Columbia Law School.

Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, LatinoJustice PRLDEF
@lyciaora

Natasha is an Associate Counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, focusing on working with low-wage Latina immigrant workers as part of the LAW (Latinas at Work) initiative. Natasha has worked on gender and racial justice issues, including access to reproductive health, sexual violence and violence against women in conflict zones. Prior to joining LatinoJustice PRLDEF, she worked in the International Women's Human Rights Clinic at CUNY School of Law and the Center for Reproductive Rights.  She clerked for the Hon. Ronald L. Ellis in the Southern District of New York and was an Ella Baker Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Natasha graduated from CUNY School of Law, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the CUNY Law Review and a Fellow at the Center for Latino/a Rights and Equality.

Natasha is also President of the National Lawyers Guild, the nation's largest and oldest progressive bar association, and Co-Chairs its Subcommittee on Puerto Rico. She has advocated before international and regional human rights bodies on issues including sexual violence in armed conflict, femicide, reproductive rights violations, hate crimes, as well as human rights violations in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Natasha has authored several articles on gender and human rights and is barred in the states of New York and New Jersey.

Esha Bhandari, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project​ 

Esha Bhandari is a staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, where she works on litigation and advocacy to protect freedom of expression and privacy rights in the digital age. She also focuses on the impact of big data and artificial intelligence on civil liberties. She has litigated cases including Sandvig v. Sessions, a First Amendment challenge to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on behalf of researchers who test for housing and employment discrimination online, and Alasaad v. Nielsen, a challenge to suspicionless electronic device searches at the U.S. border.

Esha was previously an Equal Justice Works fellow with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, where she was involved in litigating cases concerning a right to counsel in immigration proceedings and immigration detainer policies. Esha is a graduate of McGill University, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Columbia Law School, and served as a law clerk to the Hon. Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Alison Borochoff-Porte, EarthRights International

Alison Borochoff-Porte is a Bertha Legal Fellow with EarthRights International. Ali graduated from Columbia Law School in May 2015, where she was awarded a David W. Leebron Human Rights Fellowship to spend one year in ERI’s Southeast Asia offices, documenting Mekong-community perceptions of corporate social responsibility programs. During law school, Ali interned with ERI’s Chiang Mai office, received an Oldham Fellowship to study the implementation of China’s new Exit-Entry Administration Law on the Sino-Myanmar border, and participated in a year-long human rights clinic, where she worked with an interdisciplinary team to assess environmental risks and potential right to water violations associated with the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Ali holds a B.A. from Barnard College in Political Science and Human Rights, and was awarded a post-graduate Fulbright Fellowship to research the efficacy of tobacco control policies and the health concerns of tobacco farmers in Yunnan province, China. Ali is admitted to practice law in New York.

Allison Corkery, Center for Economic and Social Rights
@AllisonCorkery

Allison Corkery joined CESR in 2011. Prior to this she was the recipient of the 2010‐2011 David W. Leebron Human Rights Fellowship from Columbia Law School; under the auspices of which she collaborated with CESR and the Kenya National Commission for Human Rights on a project to enhance the capacity of national human rights institutions to monitor ESC rights. In previous positions she has worked with the Australian Human Rights Commission in Sydney and the National Institutions Unit of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. Allison holds an LL.M. from Columbia University Law School and a B.A./LL.B. from the University of New South Wales.

Katy Glenn Bass, PEN America Center
@KGlennBass

Katy Glenn Bass is the Deputy Director of PEN’s Free Expression Programs. She focuses on U.S. free expression issues, including mass surveillance and press freedom. Prior to joining PEN, Katy was the Director of Clinical Programming at NYU Law’s Center for Constitutional Transitions, where she supervised comparative constitutional law research projects focusing on the Middle East-North Africa region. From 2010-12, Katy taught in the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at Fordham Law School. She is the co-author of Suppressing Protest:  Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street.  Katy has also worked in Harare, Zimbabwe for Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, for the International Crisis Group in South Africa, and for local human rights organizations in Liberia and Sierra Leone. She holds a B.A. from Princeton University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she received the Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award.

Chinyere Ezie, Center for Constitutional Rights
@lawyergrrl

Chinyere Ezie is a Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she advocates for racial justice, gender justice, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex (LGBTQI) rights, and challenges governmental abuses of power. She is also the originator of #BoycottPrada, a campaign challenging racism and blackface in the fashion industry. Prior to joining The Center for Constitutional Rights, Chinyere worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center, where she brought cases defending the rights of LGBTQI Southerners, including trans prisoners’ rights activist Ashley Diamond. She also served as a Trial Attorney at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission where she litigated employment discrimination cases and secured a $5.1 million jury verdict and historic injunction on behalf of workers who were subjected to religious harassment.

Chinyere is a William J. Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School, where she was an Alexander Hamilton Scholar and served as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Gender and Law. Chinyere is a frequent speaker at law and social justice conferences across the country. Her advocacy has also been reported on by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC, Al Jazeera, and NPR, among others. Chinyere is a founding member of the National Trans Bar Association, and was recognized as one of the nation’s Best LGBT Lawyers Under 40.

Li Fung, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

Li Fung is a Human Rights Officer for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, covering Asia and the Pacific. She was previouslythe team leader for the Middle East and Asia at the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict. Before that, she worked for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Palestine, coordinating the humanitarian Protection Cluster in the West Bank and Gaza; in Geneva, advising on peace and security policy and operational issues, and supporting human rights components of UN peace operations; and in Cambodia, managing a programme on land-related human rights concerns. Prior to joining the United Nations in 2006, Li worked for Oxfam in the Pacific region and as a lawyer in both public and private sectors in Australia and Vanuatu. She has worked in human rights, protection, peace and security, humanitarian action, development and law in the Middle East, Asia, Pacific region and Australia.

Li is admitted as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria (Australia), and holds an LLM in international humanitarian and criminal law from the University of Melbourne, and an LLB and BA (Honours) from the University of Adelaide.

Jehanne Henry, Human Rights Watch
@jehannehenry

Jehanne Henry is a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch’s Africa division. She supervises and contributes to the work on Sudan, South Sudan, and Kenya. She has worked with the organization since 2008 focusing initially on the conflict in Darfur, then on a range of other issues in Sudan and South Sudan. Prior to joining the organization, she served as a human rights officer with the United Nations Mission in Sudan based in North Darfur. She has worked on human rights and rule of law issues with USAID in Cambodia and as a legal adviser in the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, and managed a legal aid program with the American Refugee Committee in Kosovo. Henry has also worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, and clerked for a U.S. federal judge in New York. She is admitted to the New York state bar.

Benjamin Hoffman, EarthRights International

Benjamin Hoffman has been a Supervising Attorney with EarthRights International since August 2019. He first joined EarthRights in 2011, spending three years in the Amazon office in Lima, Peru, providing litigation support to communities from the Andean-Amazonian region resisting the harmful consequences of resource extraction and mega-development projects. Through this work, Benjamin contributed to ERI's goal of better integrating community collaboration and co-empowerment in human rights advocacy strategies and methodology, and he is the co-author of several law review articles on the topic. He then worked for five years co-teaching the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic, continuing his work to disrupt global corporate-community power imbalances in the business and human rights field, including in the context of workers' rights advocacy. For his contributions to the law school, he received the 2016 Faculty Honors Award from the Columbia Society of International Law.

Benjamin received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he received the Dean's Award for Community Leadership for his work in the area of human rights. While in law school, he worked with Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, as an Ella Baker Fellow with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and as a human rights fellow with the Colombian NGO DeJuSticia.

Rahma Hussein, Human Rights Institute
@rhussein_

Rahma A. Hussein, former legal fellow with the Human Rights Institute's Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights Project, is a lawyer specializing in international human rights and international criminal law. Prior to joining the Human Rights Institute, Rahma worked at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights (RFKHR) where she was responsible for RFKHR’s litigation and advocacy case work in the Sub-Saharan Africa region. This included engaging in all stages of the proceedings before the African Court and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in cases involving civic and political participation. Rahma has also worked as a Deans Fellow for Professor Diane Orentlicher at American University Washington College of Law conducting research on transitional justice issues, as a Research Fellow for the War Crimes Research Office, in the Legal Vice Presidency Group at the World Bank, the Center for Justice and Accountability, and Human Rights First. Prior to law school, Rahma served for over two years as Project Coordinator and Legal Investigator with African Rights in Kigali Rwanda, where she worked with victims and survivors of the Rwandan genocide, collaborated with international and local prosecutors, and consulted with the UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science and international studies from the University of Chicago. She is fluent in Somali, and has advanced proficiency in French. Rahma is admitted to practice law in the state of New York.

Jonathan Horowitz, Open Society Foundations
@J_T_Horowitz

Jonathan Horowitz works at the Open Society Justice Initiative on issues relating to human rights, national security and counterterrorism, and international humanitarian law. He has conducted research in Kenya, worked on legal submissions relating to national security detentions in Spain and Egypt, and leads the drafting process for a set of guidelines on human rights and countering terrorism for the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Prior, Mr. Horowitz worked at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan on detainee affairs; documented and reported on detainee and “night-raid” abuses in Afghanistan; and was an investigator for habeas lawyers representing Guantanamo Bay detainees. Mr. Horowitz also worked for the International Criminal Court as a Sudan/Chad analyst; served as a consultant for Human Rights Watch; and documented violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in Sudan for the United Nations from 2005 to 2007. Mr. Horowitz obtained an LLM from the University of Essex in 2004 and has published on the application of human rights in times of armed conflict; international law pertaining to transfers of conflict-related detainees; human rights fact-finding methodologies; and the “Responsibility to Protect” in Darfur. He has also authored and co-authored several reports that document human rights abuses in the context of armed conflict and counterterrorism.

Wendy Isaack, Human Rights Watch
@IsaackWendy

Wendy Isaack is a researcher in the LGBT rights program at Human Rights Watch. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Wendy worked as Adjunct Professor at the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic, City University of New York (CUNY) and as an international law consultant for UN Women, Palestine Office. Wendy served as Human Rights Specialist at UN Women, providing policy support in respect of intergovernmental processes in New York and Geneva, responsible for providing technical support to the CEDAW Committee in its elaboration of General Recommendation No. 30 on the protection of women’s human rights in conflict and post-conflict contexts. A lawyer by training, she has worked for public interest litigation organizations in South Africa, the Legal Resources Centre and Centre for Applied Legal Studies, and a women’s rights organization, People Opposing Women Abuse. Wendy holds a master’s degree in Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a master’s degree in International Law with a focus on Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland.

Sarah Jackson, Amnesty International
@sjeastafrica

Sarah Jackson is Amnesty International's deputy regional director for East Africa, the Horn, and the Great Lakes. She is also a fellow at Foreign Policy Interrupted. Previously, Jackson was acting deputy Africa director, acting head of the Africa regional office, and Rwanda and Burundi researcher with Amnesty International. As a researcher she led around 15 human rights missions and wrote reports on freedom of speech and assembly, disappearances, and torture. Jackson has also worked for the American Friends Service Committee and Human Rights Watch.

Maryum Jordan, Special Litigation and Advocacy Project​

Maryum Jordan serves as Counsel for the Special Litigation and Advocacy Project. Through her work, Maryum supports legal and advocacy strategies in relation to cross cutting racial justice issues that fall outside the scope of the Lawyers’ Committee’s current projects. She also coordinates pro bono assistance to monitor law enforcement activity at demonstrations and to provide support to arrested protesters. Prior to joining the Lawyers’ Committee, Maryum was a Bertha Legal Fellow and Human Rights Attorney at EarthRights International (ERI). As a fellow, Maryum represented indigenous farmers and union activists in litigation against multinational corporations for committing human rights abuses in South America. Before her fellowship, Maryum worked in ERI’s Peru office for two years where she developed international legal and advocacy strategies with indigenous community leaders and grassroots organizations in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia.Maryum received her J.D. in 2014 from Harvard Law School where she was actively involved in the International Human Rights Clinic, and worked on human rights issues in Cambodia, Myanmar, Spain, and South Africa. She earned her B.A. from Harvard College where she majored in Anthropology

Jonathan Kaufman, Advocates for Community Alternatives

Jonathan Kaufman is the founder and Executive Director of Advocates for Community Alternatives. Prior to founding ACA, Jonathan was Legal Advocacy Coordinator at EarthRights International, where he worked with civil society groups and communities on six continents to promote accountability for corporate complicity in human rights abuse and environmental devastation.  He was a Finalist for the Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Award in 2010, and has served as an adviser to the U.S. State Department on dispute resolution between communities and corporations.  Jonathan graduated from Yale University with a combined B.A. and M.A. in Chinese, studied law at Harvard Law School, and has a degree in public policy from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School.  He was a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan in 2002-03 and speaks Mandarin Chinese, French, and Spanish.

Amanda Klasing, Human Rights Watch
@AMKlasing

Amanda Klasing is a senior researcher in the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch. Her work focuses on sexual and domestic violence, reproductive rights, and economic and social rights. She is a specialist in the rights to water and sanitation. Amanda has carried out research and advocacy on a number of human rights issues including: the rights of women and girls in Haiti after the earthquake; sexual violence and other forms of violence against women displaced by conflict in Colombia; accountability for victims of former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti; the relationship between women’s and girls’ human rights and access to good menstrual hygiene management; and the rights to water and sanitation in schools. Amanda has also been a contributing author on Human Rights Watch publications related to the post-2015 development agenda, calling for global goals grounded in human rights, including women’s rights and the rights to water and sanitation. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Amanda’s work included indigenous rights and development in Mexico, indigenous women’s role in transitional justice in Peru, and Dalit rights in India. She has also worked more broadly on immigrant rights in the United States and economic, social, and cultural rights, with a focus on the rights to water and food in Haiti.

Amanda holds a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago, and a law degree from New York University, where she received the Vanderbilt Medal for outstanding contributions to the Law School.

Clara Long, Human Rights Watch
@clarychka

Clara Long is a senior researcher with the US Program at Human Rights Watch focusing on immigration and border policy. Her reports and advocacy have covered such issues as deaths in immigration detention linked to poor medical care, mistreatment and dismissal of asylum seekers at the US border, border policing abuses, the detention of children and families, and harmful deportations of deeply-rooted long-term US residents. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, she was a Teaching Fellow with the Stanford Law School International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic. She is the co-producer of an award-winning documentary, Border Stories, about perspectives on immigration enforcement from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Clara graduated with honors from Harvard Law School and holds masters degrees from the London School of Economics in Environment and Development and from Stanford's Graduate Program in Journalism. 

Wade McMullen, RFK Partners
@wademc

Wade McMullen is the Legal Officer and Strategic Litigation Coordinator at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights (RFK Center), where he brings high impact human rights cases before international tribunals with a focus on non-discrimination and creating an enabling environment for human rights defenders.

Sarah Mehta, ACLU Human Rights Program
@sarahlmehta

Sarah Mehta is a Human Rights Researcher with the ACLU’s Human Rights Program.  Previously, Sarah worked as the detention fellow with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and as a staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan. From 2009-2011, Sarah was the Aryeh Neier fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, focusing on the rights of people with mental disabilities in the U.S. immigration system. While a law student, she was a student director of the prisoner rights clinic and worked on capital and criminal defense cases with the New Haven public defender office, as well as working in the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. She has also worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Mississippi and for civil rights attorney Mary Howell. Prior to law school, Sarah was a Fulbright scholar in India working on minority rights. She is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School.

Janine Morna, Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict
@JanineMorna

Janine is Watchlist’s Research Officer. She is responsible for preparing the organization’s “Field Monitors,” which aim to provide regular updates and policy advice, based on information from the field, to improve national and global policy responses for children affected by armed conflict.  Prior to joining Watchlist, Janine was a research fellow in the Children’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch where she investigated child labor, children’s exposure to mercury, and other child rights violations in small-scale gold mining areas. Janine also has experience conducting human rights legal and field research and advocacy with the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic, the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Gender and Media Southern Africa. Janine Morna holds a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Yale University. She is part Ghanaian, Zimbabwean, and South African and is based in New York.

Sahr Muhammedally, Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC)
@Sahrmally

Sahr manages CIVIC’s work on civilian protection and harm mitigation in the Middle East and Asia as well as US counterterrorism policies. In this position, Sahr also advises militaries and governments on harm mitigation policies and training. Sahr has worked for over a decade in the fields of armed conflict, human rights, and counterterrorism in Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Syria. Prior to joining CIVIC, Sahr was a consultant with Human Rights Watch working on South Asia and Southeast Asia and was the 2004-2005 Alan R. Finberg Fellow. From 2007-2009, Sahr was a Senior Associate at Human Rights First and undertook research and advocacy on US counterterrorism practices and policies.

Sahr practiced law in New York with Gibbons PC and has been a consultant to the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights in China, and the International Rescue Committee. Sahr is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Brooklyn Law School (cum laude).

Roopal Patel, Manhattan Legal Services

Roopal Patel is a Senior Staff Attorney at Manhattan Legal Services. She defends low-income New Yorkers in housing and immigration matters. Prior to coming to Manhattan Legal Services she was a Katz Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice working on issues regarding criminal justice debt. Prior to law school she worked with a displaced people's movement in India on litigation for resettlement and rehabilitation and was a community organizer in the South Bronx. She has a bachelors from Harvard and a JD from New York University. 

Komala Ramachandra, Human Rights Watch
@Komala_chandra

Komala Ramachandra is the Senior Researcher on Business and Human Rights at Human Rights Watch. Prior to joining HRW, Komala was an attorney with Accountability Counsel, a non-profit organization that supports communities around the world to defend their human rights and environment. She worked with communities to hold international companies and banks accountable for their actions, and ensure that national laws and institutional policies support transparency, accountability, and access to remedy. In her first year at Accountability Counsel as a Holmes Public Interest Fellow, she worked with indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon harmed by petroleum projects and on behalf of clients in Oaxaca, Mexico, impacted by a US-supported hydropower project. She then headed Accountability Counsel's work in South Asia, working with communities in Nepal and India to hold the World Bank Group accountable for human rights violations caused by its investments. Komala graduated in 2010 from Harvard Law School.

Chris Rogers, Open Society Foundations
@ChristphrRogers

Christopher Rogers is a program officer for the Regional Policy Initiative on Afghanistan & Pakistan, focusing on conflict-related detentions and civilian casualties. Prior to joining the Open Society Foundations, Rogers was the research fellow in Pakistan for the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), investigating civilian casualties from military operations, terrorism, and drone strikes and advocating for victim assistance programs. Rogers graduated from Harvard Law School in 2009 where he worked with UNHCR in Jordan on Iraqi refugee protection and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza and served as an executive editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal.

Rogers also worked with Human Rights Watch on the negotiations of the Convention on Cluster Munitions and with the International Center for Transitional Justice in Namibia through the Harvard Human Rights Program. Prior to law school, Rogers worked with development NGOs in Rwanda and South Africa. He received an MPhil in international development from Oxford University and a BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Meera Shah, Center for Reproductive Rights

Meera joined the Center for Reproductive Rights in 2015 as the Global Advocacy Adviser and is responsible for planning and executing advocacy strategies with UN bodies and mechanisms in New York. In particular, she plays a key role in the Center’s engagement with the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Before joining the Center, Meera served as a Teaching Fellow at the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law and as Clinical Advocacy Fellow at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School. In partnership with local human rights organizations and advocates, Meera supervised fact-finding, research, and advocacy projects related to human rights violations arising out of conflicts in the Middle East, where she spent several years working and studying. Meera received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a James Kent and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and was awarded the Lowenstein Fellowship for graduates pursuing public interest law. She also holds an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a B.A. in international relations from Stanford University.

Naureen Shah, American Civil Liberties Union
@naureenshah

Naureen Shah is a legislative counsel at the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, with a focus on human rights and national security. She advocates with federal agencies, Congress, the UN and international bodies on issues including domestic spying, FBI practices, and global surveillance. Prior to the ACLU, Naureen was an advocacy advisor at Amnesty International USA and conducted media and advocacy for the groundbreaking report, “Will I Be Next: US Drone Strikes in Pakistan.”  Previously, Naureen was a lecturer-in-law at Columbia University School of Law. She served as Acting Director of the school’s human rights clinic and Associate Director of the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute’s Counterterrorism & Human Rights Project.

Naureen holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a James Kent Scholar and Harlan Fiske Stone scholar, and received the Lowenstein Fellowship awarded to outstanding graduates pursuing public interest law.

Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch​
@OmarSShakir

Omar Shakir is the Israel and Palestine Country Director at Human Rights Watch, where he investigates human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Prior to his current role, he was a Bertha Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he focused on US counterterrorism policies, including legal representation of Guantanamo detainees. As the 2013-14 Arthur R. and Barbara D. Finberg Fellow at Human Rights Watch, he investigated human rights violations in Egypt, including the Rab’a massacre, one of the largest killings of protesters in a single day. A former Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Omar holds a JD from Stanford Law School, where he co-authored a report on the civilian consequences of US drone strikes in Pakistan as a part of the International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford. He speaks English and Arabic.

Dr Janani Shanthosh, The George Institute for Global Health

Dr Janani Shanthosh is a global health lawyer and Research Fellow in Health, Economics and Law at The George Institute for Global Health. Janani leads a public health law research stream within the Health Economics and Process Evaluation Division of the Centre. This work aims to develop empirical research tools that policy makers and researchers can use to evaluate public health law (in terms of power, effectiveness, acceptability and sustainability), and to inform the design of legislative reform. Janani’s research interests are at the intersection of health systems and international human rights and include the rights of frontline health workers, Indigenous participation in the design and implementation of public health law, and non-communicable disease (NCDs) prevention and the law.

Janani holds a concurrent position as Academic Lead of the Health and Human Rights Program at the Australian Human Rights (AHR) Institute, University of New South Wales. The Program works toward the progressive realisation of human rights at national, regional and global levels by improving the generation and translation of evidence about the linkages between human rights and health outcomes. Janani has represented Australia in key fora including the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Review of Australia in Geneva, Switzerland, and has published extensively in journals including the Lancet, BMJ Global Health and The International Journal of Drug Policy.

Sirine Shebaya, immigrant rights advocate

Sirine Shebaya is a longtime immigrant rights advocate who focuses on community-based litigation and advocacy to defend and advance the rights of immigrant communities of color. She has litigated several high-profile cases alongside and on behalf of communities impacted by the Muslim Ban, family separation, discriminatory police practices, and immigration detention and enforcement. In partnership with local community groups, she led a campaign that resulted in eliminating ICE holds in most jurisdictions in Maryland. Sirine's work advancing and defending immigrant rights has earned her numerous awards. She previously worked at the ACLU of Maryland and the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition.