Please feel free to contact the Center at 202-274-4180 or by email at humlaw@wcl.american.edu

Mailing Address: 4801 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20016-8187
Building Location: 4910 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Suite 16

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Robert Goldman
Robert K. Goldman is Louis C. James Scholar; co-director, Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law; faculty director, the War Crimes Research Office; and professor of law. He holds expertise in international and human rights law; U.S. foreign policy; terrorism; and law of armed conflict. From 1996 to 2004 he was a member of the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and its president in 1999. From July 2004 to July 2005, Goldman was the UN Human Rights Commission's Independent Expert on the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. In October 2005, the International Commission of Jurists named him one of the eight jurists on the Eminent Jurists Panel on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights. He is author of The Protection of Human Rights: Past, Present and Future (1972); coauthor of Middle East Watch's book, Needless Deaths in the Gulf War, a 1991 publication that assessed civilian casualties during the 39-day air campaign and assigned responsibility for violations of the laws of war; and coauthor of The International Dimension of Human Rights: A Guide For Application in Domestic Law (2001). He is also the author of scores of reports, papers and articles on human rights and humanitarian law related issues.

Dean Claudio Grossman
Claudio Grossman is a Professor of Law and Dean of American University Washington College of Law (WCL) and the Raymond Geraldson Scholar for International and Humanitarian Law. He is the author of numerous publications regarding international law and human rights (see wcl.american.edu/dean/cv.cfm). Dean Grossman was unanimously reelected Chair of the United Nations Committee against Torture in April 2010, a position he has held since April 2008, and has been a Committee member following his November 2003 election to that body. He is also a member of the Commission for the Control of Interpol's Files (since February 2005) as well as Chair of the Committee on International Cooperation of the Association of American Law Schools. Dean Grossman served as President of the College of the Americas (COLAM), an organization of colleges and universities in the Western Hemisphere, from November 2003-November 2007. He was also a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) from 1993-2001. He was twice elected its President, first in 1996 and again in 2001. He also served twice as the IACHR's First Vice President (2000-2001, 1995-1996) and Second Vice President (1999-2000). He was the IACHR's Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Women (1996-2000), Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Populations (2000-2001), and Observer of the AMIA Trial (2001-2005). Representing the IACHR, Dean Grossman participated in missions to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru, among others. On behalf of international and non-governmental organizations, he has also chaired or participated in missions to observe elections in Nepal, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Romania, Surinam, and the Middle East.

He has also received numerous awards for his work with human rights and international law, including the René Cassin Award from B'nai B'rith International in Chile and the Harry LeRoy Jones Award from the Washington Foreign Law Society. In October 2000, Dean Grossman was named Outstanding Dean of the Year by the National Association of Public Interest Law (now known as Equal Justice Works). In addition, the Inter American Press Association named Dean Grossman as the recipient of the Chapultepec Grand Prize 2002 for his achievements in the field of human rights and his work and commitment to promoting and protecting the freedom of expression and of the press for all people. In 2007, Dean Grossman received the Simón Bolívar Award from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in recognition of his lifetime achievements in promoting human rights, and the Charles Norberg International Lawyer of the Year Award from the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Inter-American Bar Association. Dean Grossman is a member of numerous associations, including the Inter-American Institute for Human Rights, for which he is a member of the Board of Directors.

Juan Méndez
Professor Méndez is a Visiting Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law and the current UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.  He also serves as an advisor on crime prevention to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. He is also Co-Chair of the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association. Until May 2009 he was the President of the International Center for Transnational Justice (ICTJ) and in the summer of 2009 he was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Ford Foundation in New York. Concurrent with his duties at ICTJ, the Honorable Kofi Annan named Professor Méndez his Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, a task he performed from 2004 to 2007. A native of Argentina, Professor Méndez has dedicated his legal career to the defense of human rights and has a long and distinguished record of advocacy throughout the Americas. As a result of his involvement in representing political prisoners, the Argentinean military dictatorship arrested him and subjected him to torture and administrative detention for more than a year. During this time, Amnesty International adopted him as a “Prisoner of Conscience.” After his expulsion from his country in 1977, Professor Méndez moved to the United States.  For 15 years, he worked with Human Rights Watch, concentrating his efforts on human rights issues in the western hemisphere. In 1994, he became general counsel of Human Rights Watch, with worldwide duties in support of the organization’s mission, including responsibility for litigation and standard setting activities. From 1996 to 1999, Professor Méndez was the Executive Director of the Inter American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica, and between October 1999 and May 2004 he was Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Between 2000 and 2003 he was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and served as its President in 2002.

Diane Orentlicher
Professor Orentlicher is a Professor of Law and was the founding faculty director of the law school’s War Crimes Research Office, which has provided legal assistance to international criminal tribunals since 1995. She is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on war crime tribunals and has lectured and written extensively on the scope of states’ obligations to address mass atrocities and on the law and policy issues relating to international criminal tribunals and universal jurisdiction. She has served as an Independent Expert and consultant to the United Nations in various capacities relating to the United Nation’s efforts to combat impunity. In September 2004, Professor Orentlicher was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General as Independent Expert to update the United Nation’s Set of Principles for the protection and promotion of human rights through action to combat impunity. Professor Orentlicher also serves as faculty co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Washington College of Law. Professor Orentlicher is currently on leave serving in the Obama Administration’s Office of War Crimes at the Department of State.

Herman Schwartz
Professor Schwartz is a Professor of Law and focuses on issues of civil rights and liberties, with special attention to constitutional reformation.  Throughout a long career in academia, publishing and community service, he has focused his attention and the world's on issues of civil rights and civil liberties as they have played out in courts and prisons across the globe. He has worked with the United Nations, the human rights advocacy group Helsinki Watch, the U.S./Israel Civil Liberties Law Program (which he founded), the ACLU Prison Project (which he founded), Washington College of Law Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and other organizations. In May 2006 he was awarded the 2006 Champion of Justice Award by the Alliance for Justice.  He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of the Open Society Institute Justice Initiative. Professor Schwartz’s current work includes hunger issues and particularly the expansion of programs for school children during the summer. Schwartz formerly chaired the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, and has developed a course in which students work with national and local public interest organizations that deal with poverty issues. He also is continuing to pursue a lifelong interest in the operations of America's courts, and frequently is called upon to analyze and write about Supreme Court decisions. Professor Schwartz has authored three books: Right-Wing Justice: The Conservative Campaign to Take over the Courts (May 2004), The Struggle for Constitutional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (2000) and Packing the Courts: The Conservative Campaign to Rewrite the Constitution (1988); edited and contributed to The Rehnquist Court: Judicial Activism on the Right (2002), and The Burger Years Rights and Wrongs in the Supreme Court 1969-1986 (1987). He has written numerous reports, articles, chapters and scholarly papers.  Professor Schwartz also serves as a faculty co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Washington College of Law.

Richard Wilson
Professor Wilson is a Professor of Law and the founding director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic. The consistent focus of Professor Wilson's scholarly work has been the tension between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of the law, whether they are individuals, countries, or entire legal cultures. He has presented three cases at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and has represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay in federal court and in military commission proceedings. His scholarly interests include the globalization of public interest law, the death penalty and international law, the role of the defense in international war crimes trials, and clinical legal education in developing or transitional countries. Professor Wilson seeks to improve access to justice by improving legal training of public interest advocates, including public interest and clinical offerings in law school curricula, opposition to the death penalty, developing models of legal representation of the poor, and effective use of international human rights law in domestic and international law. Professor Wilson is active in the development of legal aid, public defense, public interest NGOs and law school clinics throughout the world. He co-authored a report for the International Human Rights Law Group entitled Promoting Justice: A Practical Guide to Strategic Human Rights Lawyering (2001), which draws from regional meetings of human rights NGO lawyers from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Professor Wilson is also interested in new developments in the law, procedures and structures for providing appointed defense counsel in international war crimes trials and international criminal tribunals.

Hadar Harris

Hadar Harris is the Executive Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law in Washington, DC. As such, she is responsible for an annual program of 50-70 events and conferences, a variety of grant-funded programs and approximately 20 ongoing collaborative projects with students and NGOs around the world. These include current projects focused on the teaching of International Humanitarian Law; the integration of human rights approaches and legal arguments into the work of legal service providers (poverty lawyers); and the launching of a key web-based resource for the human rights community: www.hrbrief.org. Ms. Harris is an international human rights attorney and specializes in issues of civil and political rights, gender equality, and domestic implementation of international norms. She has worked extensively in assessing and reviewing national compliance with international human rights treaties, working both with NGOs and governmental bodies and advising on implementation of recommendations. In Spring 2002, she piloted an assessment tool developed by the American Bar Association/CEELI to review national compliance with the provisions of the Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The pilot project was run in Armenia and the final report was submitted for review to the United Nations and to the Armenian government. She developed an implementation protocol and consulted on similar assessments in Serbia, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Macedonia. She has assisted in developing shadow reports, government reports or trained government and civil society representatives on a variety of treaties in various parts of the world including Botswana, Israel, Lao PDR, Kosovo, and the United States. In addition, Ms. Harris has worked on a variety of other human rights issues. In 2002, she consulted on proposed reforms to the Moroccan Criminal Procedure Code which resulted in 70% of recommended changes being adopted by the Moroccan parliament. In 2001, she was involved in a trial on behalf of four Bosnian Muslims suing their Serbian torturer in US Federal Court in Atlanta, Georgia which resulted in nearly $140 million in damages being awarded to the victims. From 2003-2006, she helped to create the first-ever network of legal academics and activists discussing gender mainstreaming and legal education in India, the Gender and Law Association of India (GALA). Since 2006, she has run a collaborative project to build capacity for the Human Rights Studies Centre and Gender Studies Department at the University of Peshawar (Pakistan). Ms. Harris has worked as an international election observer with the UN/OSCE joint mission in Azerbaijan and taught law at Khazar University in Baku. She also lived and worked in Jerusalem where she was the Director of Program and Resource Development for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). She formerly served as the Executive Director of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, a bipartisan legislative service organization of the United States House of Representatives. Ms. Harris has her BA in Political Science from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and her Juris Doctor in Law from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Ann Jordan
Ann Jordan is the Director of the Program on Trafficking and Forced Labor at the Center on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law. This project was created to raise awareness of the widespread trade and exploitation of human beings and also to promote a rights-based approach to combating this issue. By focusing on the effects of the sex trade as well as the consequences of forced labor, this program seeks to widen the debate to promote effective and far-reaching solutions at both the international and local level to combat all aspects of human trafficking. Program Director Ann Jordan is an international human rights attorney who specializes in issues of human trafficking, forced labor and women’s rights. For ten years, she was the Director of the Initiative against Trafficking in Persons at Global Rights and spent eight years in Hong Kong and China teaching women’s rights, human rights, criminal law and torts and advocating for and writing about women’s rights in China and Hong Kong. She actively participated with an international coalition of NGOs in the development of the UN Trafficking Protocol and with a U.S. NGO coalition in the development of the U.S. Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act. She was a member of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice in the International Criminal Court, which successfully advocated during the negotiation process for the inclusion of women and women’s issues at all levels of the Court. She works with a broad international coalition of advocacy and grassroots organizations on building local capacity to develop and advocate for human rights-based programs on human trafficking and forced labor and to carry out evidence-based research and programming that addresses and supports the needs and rights of the affected persons. She has worked in or on projects in China, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Bosnia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Ukraine. The Program supports the creation of networks, promotes conceptual clarity and offers training on rights-based laws and policies. Currently, the Program focuses on transparency and accountability in U.S. anti-trafficking policies and grant making and on developing materials to promote a greater understanding of the complexity of human trafficking and its intersection with labor migration policies, sexual rights, health rights and women’s rights. Ms. Jordan was intimately involved in developing the Freedom Network (USA) to Empower Trafficked and Enslaved Persons, a premier U.S. NGO anti-trafficking network of service providers and advocates. In addition, she is on the board of advisors of the Open Society Institute Sexual Health and Rights Program and also the central and eastern European anti-trafficking network, La Strada. She earned her law and undergraduate degrees at Columbia University and serves as an advisor to several NGOs and networks.

Lauren E. Bartlett
Lauren E. Bartlett is the Project Director of the Local Human Rights Lawyering Project at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law. Prior to coming to WCL, Ms. Bartlett worked as a legal services attorney at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services in the foreclosure prevention unit from 2008-2011. She taught a housing law and policy course at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and served on the board of the ACLU of Louisiana. In 2007, she co-founded the Louisiana Justice Institute, a nonprofit civil rights legal advocacy organization. During law school Lauren focused on gaining a strong background in international law and human rights. She was an articles editor for the Human Rights Brief, participated in a research program in Geneva, Switzerland for the U.N. Committee Against Torture, and was an Executive Board Member of the student group Action for Human Rights. She also served as a summer associate with the group Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Prior to law school, Ms. Bartlett worked with non-profit organizations in California, Nepal, Ghana, Bangladesh and India, alongside advocates fighting for social and environmental justice. She received a B.A. from the University of California, Davis and is a graduate of American University Washington College of Law. Ms. Bartlett is admitted to practice law in California and Louisiana.

Cecili Thompson Williams
Cecili Thompson Williams is the Assistant Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law.  She most recently served at the Outreach Director on the Campaign for Better Care at the National Partnership for Women & Families. In this capacity, she was responsible for grassroots mobilization and network outreach to press for changes in health care delivery that older adults with multiple health problems and their families urgently need and deserve. Ms. Thompson Williams’ background is in organizing, training, and researching on a variety of human rights and social justice topics including women's rights, torture, poverty, healthcare, and labor issues. Prior to joining the Campaign for Better Care, Ms. Thompson Williams served as the Deputy Director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Office of Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) where she oversaw campaigning, activist training, and human rights education activities in the region. In this role, she served in the leadership of the Individuals At Risk and Counter Terror with Justice campaigns and was responsible for the Human Rights Education Service Corps program and the annual Regional Conference. Prior to joining the staff at AIUSA, she served as a volunteer Mexico Country Specialist for 7 years, researching human rights violations in Mexico and designing and implementing campaign strategies. Previously, Ms. Thompson Williams held the role of High Burden Country Project Associate on the Global Tuberculosis Project at RESULTS Educational Fund and, prior to that, served as the Workers’ Compensation Research Associate at the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Melissa C. del Aguila
Melissa C. del Aguila is a Program Coordinator at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law.  She has worked extensively on the issue of the right to education and has experience working with domestic legal accountability mechanisms within the context of Colombia.  During law school, Ms. del Aguila worked on issues relating to the education, non-discrimination, and equal protection rights of Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples within the Inter-American Human Rights System as part of the Cornell International Human Rights Clinic.  In this capacity, she presented as a panelist at the Colombian National Congress in Bogotá and also assisted in developing observations and recommendations for the Organization of American States’ (OAS) Working Group charged with preparing a Draft Inter-American Convention against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance. Prior to law school, Ms. del Aguila served as a Princeton-in-Latin America Fellow at the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress in San José, Costa Rica where she worked on projects relating to gender, political participation and human security.  She has also held internship and research positions at the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children, where she focused on issues relating to asylum law and human trafficking.  Ms. del Aguila has an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University and a Juris Doctor in Law and LL.M. in International and Comparative Law from Cornell Law School.