Spotlight: Clinical Profile

Sharanjeet Parmar, Clinical Advocacy Fellow with the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, brings many years of experience in international humanitarian law and international criminal law to her work with the International Human Rights Clinic. Parmar has spent the past five years working in various countries, building coalitions between international and local NGOs, community-based organizations and activist organizations working on a wealth of human rights issues.

As a former human rights lawyer for the HIV/AIDS Unit of the Lawyers Collective in Delhi and Mumbai, India, Parmar worked on issues pertaining to gay rights and gender rights, helping mobilize and organize HIV activists and community-based organizations to lobby the Indian government, and to break down misconceptions of sexuality in India. According to Parmar, the philosophy at the crux of this work was the notion “that if you protect human rights, you protect human health.” This work provided a very real context for the connections between human rights and public health, a context that continues to remain a focus of Parmar’s work.

From 2002-2005, Parmar worked as a trial attorney with the Office of the Prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Set up jointly by the Government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations, the Special Court of Sierra Leone was mandated to prosecute those responsible for committing violations of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leonean law in the late 1990s.

Parmar served as a trial attorney and international investigator in Sierra Leone, focusing on the use of child soldiers and gender crimes. Parmar said that her ability to draw close to the stories of these individuals made her a better lawyer, and instilled in her a firm sense of teamwork and trust with her coworkers.

“What made me a great prosecutor was having empathy for these human stories,” Parmar said. “When you have empathy, you ask better questions, you get better testimony, and people feel more free to talk with you and share with you their stories.”

Parmar directed and supervised field investigations involving child witnesses, examined child witnesses in Court, collaborated with international organizations and child protections agencies, and facilitated the testimony of expert witnesses on crimes against children. This work centered on children who were both victims of violence, and also those who committed acts of violence, including child soldiers.

Parmar also interviewed survivors of gender-based violence in Sierra Leone, researching and analyzing gender crimes, and coordinating fieldwork with civil society groups and social service organizations working on gender-based violence issues.

“It was a great environment. I saw different cultures working together. North, South, African, Non-African…we just crossed so many barriers,” Parmar said. Parmar stressed the importance of working in coalition with NGOs, local activists and civil society groups, especially in work involving investigative fact-finding. “You can’t lead an investigation team without coordinating with other NGOs. You can have your mission, but you can’t execute if you think you’re the only kid in town. There are just too many connections between issues for collaboration not to take place.”

After she left Sierra Leone in 2005, Parmar traveled to the South Sudan, where she worked as a rule of law officer and legal aid manager for the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Parmar was responsible for initiating a community-based legal aid program under the IRC’s Rule of Law and Protection Program, which included basic human rights training and capacity-building for local paralegals.

Part of providing these basic legal needs included “building bridges between international and local contexts,” Parmar said. In one case, when Parmar was trying to explain the process of submitting UN reports, she used a globe to show where Sudan was, and that reports would eventually wind up in New York, halfway across the world.

Fostering these skills, as well as building human rights networks with local organizations, was all part of trying to re-establish many of the systems that broke down in the wake of violent conflict.

“After years of sustained conflict, social institutions break down,” Parmar said. “The key to building them back together is the rule of law.”

For Parmar, human rights lawyering is a prism of different activities and capacities, and can be done in so many different ways. Parmar said she hopes to pass this lesson along to students this year.

Working with students enrolled in the International Human Rights Clinic, Parmar said that she anticipates addressing the transitional justice issues that lie at the center of post-conflict areas, including projects in Liberia, and also projects focused on the intersection of health and human rights, including one on researching access to HIV/AIDS treatment, and a public interest petition challenging the sodomy provisions of the Indian Penal Code. Parmar said she hopes this work will provide a great window for students to see the different ways in which human rights advocates practice.

“You have to appreciate that human rights lawyering is dynamic,” said Parmar. “It’s not just reports. It’s coalition-building and collaborating. It’s being a facilitator. We have so much access to information, so our job becomes opening doors where people don’t even know doors exist.”