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.
William Abresch
Director, Project on Extrajudicial Executions
William Abresch is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the New York University School of Law. His research interests include amnesty laws, the use of lethal force by law enforcement officials, and the interaction between human rights law and humanitarian law, and he has published articles in the European Journal of International Law and the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs. He has participated in human rights fact-finding missions to Guatemala, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka.
Sarah Knuckey
Research Scholar
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 refugee rights and detention, indigenous rights, counter-terrorism, torture, rape, the right to life, forced relocation, 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).
Current Research Assistants
Amélie Baudot, Jordan Kahn, and Catherine Sweetser
Former Staff and Research Assistants
Jason Morgan-Foster was formerly a Reseach Scholar of the Project.
Former research assistants: Aarthi Anand, Mana Barari, Adrian Friedman, Colin Grey, Shamiso Mbizvo, and Yining Wang.