Martha Davis
Professor Davis (September 2008-June 2009) teaches Women's Rights Lawyering, Constitutional Law and Professional Responsibility at Northeastern University School of Law. She is also a faculty director for the law school's Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy. Professor Davis has written widely on women's rights, poverty and human rights. She recently co-edited Bringing Human Rights Home, a three-volume work chronicling the U.S. human rights movement. In 2008, Bringing Human Rights Home was named one of the best books in the field of human rights by the U.S. Human Rights Network. Professor Davis's book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, received the Reginald Heber Smith Award for distinguished scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice, and was also honored by the American Bar Association in its annual Silver Gavel competition.
Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty in 2002, Professor Davis was vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. She was counsel in a number of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including Nguyen v. INS, a challenge to sex-based citizenship laws that she argued before the court. Professor Davis has also served as a fellow at the Bunting Institute, as the first Kate Stoneman Visiting Professor of Law and Democracy at Albany Law School and as a Soros Reproductive Rights Fellow.
Professor Davis chairs the board of directors of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative and serves on the editorial board of the Harvard School of Public Health's publication Health and Human Rights.
Mehrangiz Kar
Mehrangiz Kar (September 2006 – June 2009) is an attorney, writer, and activist working toward the promotion of democracy, rule of law, and human rights within the framework of Islamic law in the Islamic Republic of Iran since the revolution in 1979. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard (2004-05), as well as a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (2005-06). She has also been recognized as a Scholar at Risk. In April 2000, following her participation in a symposium in Berlin, she was arrested and imprisoned on charges of acting against the national security of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Three of the five charges against her are pending, for which she may again be arrested upon her return. She was the 2004 recipient of the annual Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights) Human Rights Award and in 2002 received the Ludovic Trarieux International Human Rights Prize (France) for a lawyer working to promote women’s human rights, awarded jointly by the Human Rights Institute of the Bar of Bordeaux and the European Lawyers’ Union.
While at HRP, she will work on a manuscript pertaining to women’s rights in Iran, and the possibility for civil society action.
Julita Lemgruber
Julita Lemgruber (September 2008-January 2009) is a sociologist, former Director of the Prison System and former Police Ombudsman in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With a Master's degree from IUPERJ, she has published the books Cemetery of the Living, Who Guards the Guardians?, and many other papers on the police, prisons and alternative sentences. Formerly a member of the National Council for Criminal and Penitentiary Policy in the Brazilian Ministry of Justice, she is now a member of the Board of the International Center for Prison Studies and of the Altus Global Alliance, non-governmental organizations based, respectively, in London and in The Hague.
Charles Ngwena
Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow
Charles Ngwena, LL.M., LL.B., (May 2009 – December 2009) is the Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow with the Human Rights Program. He is a Barrister-at Law, and a Professor in the Department of Constitutional Law of the Faculty of Law of the University of the Free State. Prior to joining the University of the Free State in 2002, he taught law at Cardiff Law School
(University of Wales 1988-1994), the University of Swaziland (1995) and Vista
University (1996-2001).
Professor Ngwena has taught, researched and published widely on issues at the intersection between human rights, ethics and health care, including HIV/AIDS, reproductive health. In recent years, he has begun to research and publish on disability. He was a co-editor of the Butterworths Medico-Legal Reports (UK) for which he now serves as an advisory editor. He serves on the editorial board of Medical Law International. He is Section Editor of Developing World Bioethics and Chief Editor of the Journal for Juridical Science. He has co-edited of two books - Employment Equity Law (2001) with Professor JL Pretorius and Ms E Klink and Health and Human Rights (2007) with Professor RJ Cook.
Professor Ngwena serves on a number of national and international committees, including the Scientific and Ethical Review Group of the Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction of the World Health Organization. His current work focused on and reproductive and sexual health and rights, and disability and equality in the workplace. He directs an LLM programme on
Reproductive and Sexual Rights which he initiated in 2005.
Tom Pegram
National Human Rights Institutions Fellow
Tom Pegram is the NHRI fellow of the Human Rights Program and is also completing a PhD in political science at Nuffield College, University of Oxford where he has taught Comparative Government. His doctorate research is on national human rights institutions in democratising political systems, with a particular interest in their political accountability function. Pegram has conducted field research on NHRIs throughout Latin America. He completed his Bachelor degree in International Politics with Law at Aberystwyth University and McGill University and received a Masters in Latin American Studies from St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford in 2006. Pegram has acted as a panellist and consultant on political, human rights and conflict issues in Latin America for a number of academic, practitioner and NGO bodies. He has also worked at the International Law and Organizations Program at the London Secretariat of Amnesty International and for a Peruvian non-governmental organization. His most recent publication is “Accountability in hostile times: the case of the Peruvian Human Rights Ombudsman 1996-2001,” Journal of Latin American Studies 40 (2008). Pegram is proficient in Spanish.
Alicia Ely Yamin
Alicia Ely Yamin (September 2007- June 2009) is a Global Health and Human Rights Fellow with the Human Rights Program and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy,
Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. She is an instructor in law and public health at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of
Research and Investigations at Physicians for Human Rights. She has been a leader in the conceptualization of rights-based approaches to health,
authoring dozens of articles and conducting ground-breaking fieldwork. She received both her J.D. and M.P.H. from Harvard University.
During her fellowship, Yamin will explore defining dimensions of rights-based approaches to health, including possibilties for, and challenges to establishing
accountability for violations and progress.
Click here to view a list of publications and articles by Alicia Ely Yamin.