People
Philip Alston
UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions
Philip Alston is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law. He was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions in July 2004. For 2005-06 he is Chairperson of the Coordinating Committee for all of the Human Rights Special Procedures of the UN Commission on Human Rights. He has long been active in the field of human rights, as an adviser to groups such as Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists, as a founding Board Member of Physicians for Human Rights, and as Chairperson of the Board of the Center for Economic and Social Rights. As a UN official in the early 1980s he worked on the drafting of the UN Convention against Torture, and he has since written extensively on international human rights institutions and procedures, including those dealing with questions of extrajudicial executions.
Sarah Knuckey
Director, Project on Extrajudicial Executions
Sarah Knuckey has worked with non-governmental and international organisations in Australia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, the UK and the USA, leading human rights fact-finding missions, reporting on human rights violations and providing humanitarian and human rights legal and policy advice. Her work has addressed a range of humanitarian and human rights concerns, including indigenous rights, counter-terrorism, torture, rape, the right to life, and the liability of transnational corporations and other non-state actors for human rights abuses. Previously, she was a Clerk to the Hon Justice Michael Kirby at the High Court of Australia, Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar, Lionel Murphy Postgraduate Scholar, Harvard Human Rights Program Summer Fellow, and Everett Public Interest Internship recipient (at Human Rights Watch). She has a BA and LLB (Hons) (University of Western Australia), an LLM (Harvard), and is currently a PhD candidate (University of London).
Hina Shamsi
Senior Advisor, Project on Extrajudicial Executions
Hina Shamsi has engaged in human rights research, litigation and policy advocacy on a variety of issues, including torture, detention, fair trial practices, and the freedoms of speech and association. Her particular area of focus has been the intersection of national security and counterterrorism policies and international human rights and humanitarian law. She is the author and co-author of publications on torture and extraordinary rendition, and is an adjunct professor of international human rights at Columbia Law School. She previously worked as a Staff Attorney in the ACLU’s National Security Project. Before joining the ACLU, she was the Acting Director/Deputy Director and Senior Counsel of Human Rights First’s Law & Security Program. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the Northwestern University School of Law.
Current Research Assistants
Noam Biale, Lawrence Dabney, Joanna Edwards, Anna Hood, Wade McMullen, and Madeleine Sinclair.
Former Staff and Research Assistants
William Abresch was the Director of the Project from 2005-2008.
Jason Morgan-Foster was formerly a Research Scholar of the Project.
Former research assistants: Aarthi Anand, Mana Barari, Amélie Baudot, Eimear Farrell, Geoff Fox, Adrian Friedman, Colin Grey, Jordan Kahn, Tessa Khan, Joey H Lee, Sara Memo, Shamiso Mbizvo, Catherine Sweetser, Nikos Valance, Yining Wang, and Rupert Watters.