Open Society Justice Initiative Board Members

Aryeh Neier (ex officio), Chair

Aryeh Neier is president of the Open Society Foundations. Read his full biography.

Chaloka Beyani

Chaloka Beyani is the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons and a senior lecturer in International Law and Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he has taught since 1996. He has taught international law and human rights at Oxford and at the University of Zambia. His publications are in public international law, human rights, the movement of persons and populations, territorial disputes, legitimacy of states, migrants, African legal systems, and constitutional reforms.

Beyani is an international United Nations expert on internally displaced persons, population transfers, mercenaries and private military companies, sexual and reproductive health, and the human rights approach to development. He is the chair of the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics, a member of the advisory group to the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, and the Africa Advisory Committee for Open Society Justice Initiative. He sits on the board of Interights. He is a former member of the board of Oxfam the International Minority Rights Group, and the Independent Diplomat.

Beyani was a member of the High Level Panel of Eminent Persons of the African Union on the Formation of an African Union Government. He has advised the African Union on the issue of universal jurisdiction and was a member of the African Union and European Union ad hoc Expert Group on Universal Jurisdiction. He has drafted and negotiated the adoption of the Pact of Peace, Stability and Development of the Great Lakes Region in 2006. He also drafted and negotiated the adoption of the African Union Convention on the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in 2009. He was a member of the Committee of Experts on the Constitutional Review of the Constitution of Kenya, which prepared and drafted the new Constitution of Kenya 2010.

Maja Daruwala

Maja Daruwala is the executive director of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, an international NGO mandated to ensure the practical realization of human rights across the Commonwealth. She presently serves on several boards including Oxfam GB, the International Women's Health Coalition, the International Records Management Trust, and the Centre for Environment and Food Security. She is chair of the Multiple Action Research Group (India), which works on legal empowerment of the poor.

Daruwala's earlier services include being chairperson of Minority Rights Group and chair and co-founder of People's Watch Tamil Nadu, a group that is particularly focused on ending torture. She is actively engaged in numerous other human rights initiatives and concentrates on issues relating to civil liberties including police reform, prison reform, right to information, discrimination, freedom of expression, and human rights advocacy capacity building. She has recently been awarded the 2010 Nani A. Palkhivala Award for defending and preserving civil liberties in India.

Yonko Grozev

Yonko Grozev is a human rights lawyer practicing with Grozev and Dobreva in Sofia, Bulgaria. Since 2005 he has also been program director with the Centre for Liberal Strategies, a Sofia based think tank. In this capacity he has been doing research and advocacy on improving the Bulgarian justice system. His law practice is focused on human rights litigation before the Bulgarian Courts and the European Court of Human Rights.

Between 1995 and 2005 he was the head of the Legal Defence Programme of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee. Grozev has filed and won a large number of cases before the European Court of Human Rights on, among others, the right to life, prohibition of torture, freedom of speech, religion and association and the prohibition of discrimination. He was awarded the 2002 International Human Rights Award of the American Bar Association Section of Litigation. He is also active in providing human rights litigation training and consulting to lawyers from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He is a graduate of the Sofia University and holds an LLM from Harvard Law School.

Asma Jahangir

Asma Jahangir is an advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and has been twice elected chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Since 2004, she has been special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. She is also a director of the AGHS Legal Aid Cell, which provides free legal assistance to the needy. From 1998 to 2004, Jahangir was special rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions. She has been a commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists since 1988.

Jahangir has defended cases of discrimination against religious minorities, women, and children, and represented several clients who were denied their fundamental rights. Jahangir was instrumental in the formation of the Punjab Women Lawyers Association in 1980 and the Women Action Forum in 1985. She was placed under house arrest and later imprisoned for participating in the movement to restore political and fundamental rights under the military regime in 1983. Due to her efforts to secure justice for disadvantaged groups, she has been frequently threatened by militant groups.

Anthony Lester

Anthony Lester is a practicing member of the English Bar and a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords. He specializes in constitutional and human rights law. Lester is a founder and honorary president of Interights (the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights) and former chair of the European Roma Rights Center and of The Equal Rights Trust. He is a leading authority and co-editor of a major textbook on human rights law and practice. He is also a member of the Commission on a British Bill of Rights.

Lester was instrumental in the 30-year campaign that led to the United Kingdom’s enactment in 1998 of the Human Rights Act, which gave legal effect to the European Convention of Human Rights. He has introduced influential bills on human rights, civil partnership, equality, executive powers, forced marriage, cohabitation rights, and defamation in Parliament. Lester has argued many leading constitutional and human rights cases in the two European Courts and British and Commonwealth courts, and has been a member of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights.

Jenny S. Martinez

Jenny S. Martinez is a professor at Stanford Law School, where she teaches international law, international human rights, constitutional law, and civil procedure. Her current research focuses on international criminal law, terrorism and human rights, and the interaction of international and domestic legal institutions. In 2004, she argued Rumsfeld v. Padilla, one of the “enemy combatants” cases, in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Martinez worked as an associate legal officer at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague, where she worked with Judge Patricia Wald on criminal trials involving genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Professor Martinez also practiced law with the firm Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., where she focused on constitutional appellate litigation. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, Professor Martinez was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and to U.S Court of Appeals Judge Guido Calabresi.

Juan E. Méndez

Juan E. Méndez is the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, a visiting professor at the American University Washington College of Law and the special advisor on crime prevention to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. He is the former president of International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and currently its president emeritus. 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, Méndez was the executive director of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica. 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. From July 2004 to March 2007—and concurrently with his job as president of ICTJ—Méndez served at the United Nations as the special adviser to the secretary general on the prevention of genocide. Starting in 2010, he is co-chair of the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association.

Herman Schwartz

Herman Schwartz, professor of law at American University, has worked for human rights both in the United States and abroad for over five decades. When communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union fell, he advised numerous former Soviet bloc countries as well as emerging democracies elsewhere on constitutional, human rights, and other legal reforms.

Schwartz served as a member of the United States Delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and in June 1993, was one of four public members of the U.S. Delegation to the UN World Human Rights Conference in Vienna. In 1983, he founded and now administers the US/Israel Civil Liberties Law program, which is designed to train and develop a Jewish and Palestinian human rights bar in Israel. Schwartz is co-director of the Washington College of Law Human Rights Center and has worked with many other domestic and foreign public interest organizations. He is the author of various books and articles on American and European constitutional and human rights issues.

Christopher E. Stone

Christopher E. Stone is the Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he chairs the program on criminal justice policy and management. His current research focuses on the dynamics of criminal justice reform globally and performance measurement in national and local criminal justice systems.

From 1994 to 2004, Stone served as director of the Vera Institute of Justice, where his work focused on institutional reform of police, prosecution, and public defense services both in the United States and internationally. Stone also serves as faculty director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. In 2006, he was awarded an honorary Order of the British Empire for his contributions to criminal justice reform in the United Kingdom.

Patricia McGowan Wald

Patricia McGowan Wald served a term as a member of the President's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which examined the state of pre-Iraq War intelligence and proposed reforms to the intelligence community. Previously, Wald served on the 14-member panel in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, from 1999 to 2001. She was appointed to the post in 1999 by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Wald previously served as chief judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and as assistant attorney general for legislative affairs in the Department of Justice. She is an emeritus council member and vice president of the American Law Institute. She has traveled and consulted with Eastern European judicial and legal organizations for the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative-American Bar Association. Her published works are extensive, including articles on judicial administration, women’s rights, international and comparative law, legislative history, criminal procedure, juvenile law, administrative law (environmental review), judicial ethics, and mental health law.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is the executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), a national, non-governmental organization that works to promote the human rights of all Kenyans through research and advocacy as well as civic action. She previously worked, for seven years, as the executive director of the African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), a pan-African membership organization working towards African women's development, equality, and other human rights through advocacy at the regional and international levels, training on gender mainstreaming, and communications.

Wanyeki serves as an advisor/Board member for several African and other organisations, including: Human Rights Watch’s Africa program, the National Governing Council for the African Peer Review Mechanism in Kenya, the African Leadership Centre, the Open Society Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP), the Institute for Economic Affairs, and the Forum International de Montreal.