Clinical Advocacy Fellow Adrienne Fricke on affecting change outside of the routine channels
As a Clinical Advocacy Fellow at the International Human Rights
Clinic at Harvard Law School, Adrienne Fricke brings a solid background in the field and a long-standing commitment and passion for human rights.
Fricke has traveled extensively over the past 10 years, particularly in the Middle East, documenting and researching human rights abuses and
human rights law.
As a Fulbright Scholar in 1995, Fricke lived in Syria, where she was introduced by an Arabic tutor to a tight-knit community of former
political prisoners. Fricke spent the next four years interviewing a number of these political prisoners, many of whom were students,
doctors, and lawyers, who had been detained in the 1980s during a time when the Syrian government cracked down on political opposition
groups. “I carried out a project to interview them in detail about their experiences in prison and their strategies for both physical
and intellectual survival,” said Fricke. Many of the prisoners, she said, carried out amazing projects in prison, from performing plays
to creating artwork on cigarette papers.
Fricke said her research in Syria was a humbling experience, and the beginning of what has been a decade-long focus on human
rights. “It’s a very humbling experience working where conditions of life and intellectual production are invariably more
difficult,” Fricke said. “No matter how difficult it seems to take on Middle East human rights problems, human rights advocates
can always take inspiration from people on the ground building civil society.”
After leaving Syria, Fricke returned to the U.S. and volunteered with the Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First)
while a graduate student at New York University. Fricke focused on Sudanese rule of law issues in her research, and did pro-bono
interpretation with Sudanese asylum seekers, participating in initial interviews to assess the validity of their cases.
Fricke continued to pursue human rights work, studying Islamic Family Law, and traveling to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, and
Turkey. Fricke has particularly focused some of her work on the judicial system in Egypt, and more recently in Eastern Chad, as the
crisis in Darfur spreads over into the country. In 2004, Fricke served as a member of the Coalition for International Justice’s Atrocities
Documentation Team, conducting field interviews of Darfuri refugees in camps in Eastern Chad for a study funded by the State Department/USAID.
More than 1,100 interviews were conducted as part of this study, and the testimony provided was used to brief then Secretary of State Colin
Powell, as well as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist about the Darfur crisis.
According to Fricke, the law provides a powerful set of tools for approaching the problems encountered in Syria, Egypt, the Sudan and
elsewhere, and fuels the purpose that has guided her work for human rights: “How do you go about affecting change where the routine
channels don’t always function as they should?” The answer to this question can be evasive, says Fricke, especially when working on issues
in the Middle East.
“One of the challenges for doing human rights work in the Middle East is that there is not that much of a legal infrastructure for
talking about rights. So it’s up to us to be creative,” said Fricke.
Fricke’s hopes for her work with students in the Human Rights Program are that she can foster strategies for international advocacy,
help develop interviewing skills, advance research of international and foreign law, further hone legal writing and analysis, and provide
students with an awareness of the political and social history of the Middle East.
“People who do Middle East clinical projects might not work in the Middle East, but they will learn a lot,” said Fricke.
“The Middle East is a hard place to learn about through books. Looking at legal systems and legal narratives – the way people
tell stories about the political process – is a good way of learning. Sometimes just going and listening is the best way of learning.”
“…In terms of the clinic, our goal is to find out what is going to be most helpful to organizations in the Middle East and sensitive to
their needs, while developing projects for students to learn about international law and Middle East political and social history.”