Freedom Now: Freeing Prisoners of Conscience through Legal, Political, and Public Relations Advocacy
Home Overview Board Campaigns Suggest a Case Links Media Contribute Contact
 
  BOARD

 

BOARD OF ADVISORS

Professor Karima Bennoune is an Assistant Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law (Newark). Professor Bennoune graduated from a joint program in law and Middle Eastern and North African studies at the University of Michigan, earning a J.D. cum laude from the law school and an M.A. from the Rackham Graduate School, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies. She received a joint B.A. in history and semiotics with honors from Brown University. In 1995 she served as a Center for Women's Global Leadership delegate to the NGO Forum at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. From 1995 until 1999, she was based in London as a legal adviser at Amnesty International.

Professor Jerome A. Cohen is a Senior Fellow for Asia, Council on Foreign Relations; a law professor at New York University School of Law; and is of counsel to the international law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Mr. Cohen specializes in the international legal problems of East Asia. Mr. Cohen is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale College (B.A. 1951).  He spent the academic year 1951-1952 as a Fulbright Scholar in France and graduated in 1955 from Yale Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal and Order of the Coif.  He was Law Secretary to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1955 Term and Law Secretary to Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court in the 1956 Term.  He subsequently practiced law, served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, and was a consultant to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations before beginning his academic career at the University of California School of Law at Berkeley in 1959.  He moved to Harvard Law School in 1964 and remained a faculty member there until he joined Paul, Weiss in 1981.

The Honorable Irwin Cotler has been a Member of the Canadian Parliament since 1999, and served as Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada (2003-2006). Mr. Cotler is currently on leave as a Professor of Law at McGill University, where he is Director of its Human Rights Programme, and Chair of InterAmicus, the McGill-based International Human Rights Advocacy Centre. An international human rights lawyer, Professor Cotler served as Counsel to former prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union (Andrei Sakharov), South Africa (Nelson Mandela), Latin America (Jacobo Timmerman), and Asia (Muchtar Pakpahan). He later served as international legal counsel to imprisoned Russian environmentalist Aleksandr Nikitin; Nigerian playwright and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka; the Chilean-Canadian group Vérité et justice in the Pinochet case; and Chinese-Canadian political prisoner, Professor KunLun Zhang. More recently, he served as Counsel to Professor Saad Edin Ibrahim, the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world. A feature article on him in Maclean's magazine referred to him as “Counsel for the Oppressed.”

Professor J. Christopher McCrudden is Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a former Specialist Advisor to the British House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on Fair Employment; a (non-practicing) Barrister-at-Law (Gray's Inn); former member of the Northern Ireland Secretary of State's Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights; a current member of the European Commission's Expert Network on the Application of the Equality Directives; and a member of the Northern Ireland Minister of Finance taskforce on public procurement. Professor McCrudden specializes in human rights (international, European, and comparative), concentrating recently on the relationship between international economic law and human rights. He earned an LL.B. from Queen's University, Belfast, an LL.M. from Yale Law School, and a D.Phil. from Oxford.

Harry C. McPherson is Senior Counsel with DLA Piper LLP (US) in Washington, D.C. Since joining the firm in 1969, he has represented and counseled businesses, nonprofit organizations, foreign governments, and individuals on a wide range of matters before the executive branch, the Congress, regulatory agencies, and other public bodies.  Mr. McPherson served as counsel, then special counsel, to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1965 to 1969. Previously he had served as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs; as deputy under-secretary of the Army for international affairs; and as a member of the Department of the Army Secretariat. He was counsel to the U.S. Senate Democratic Party Committee, the key legislative policy organ on the Senate side for the Democratic Party.  He earned an LL.B. from the University of Texas Law School and a B.A. at the University of the South.

Nuala Mole is the Founding Director of the AIRE Centre ("Advice on Individual Rights in Europe') in London. She has worked in human rights for almost twenty years and has been involved in more than twenty-five cases before the European Commission and Court of Human Rights. She earned her degree in law at Oxford University.

Professor A.W. Brian Simpson is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He earned an M.A. and a Doctorate of Civil Law from Oxford University. He was a fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. His publications include Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention; A History of the Common Law of Contract; A Biographical Dictionary of the Common Law; Cannibalism and the Common Law; A History of the Land; Law, Legal Theory and Legal History; In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain; and Leading Cases in the Common Law.

The Honorable Patricia M. Wald served for 20 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (1979-1999), including five years as Chief Judge (1986-1991). Judge Wald serves on the Open Society Institute's Justice Initiative Board (2002-present). Prior to serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District Court of Columbia, Judge Wald was the Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs at the Department of Justice, an attorney with the Mental Health Law Project, an attorney with the Center for Law and Social Policy, co-director of the Ford Foundation Drug Abuse Research Project, an attorney with the Neighborhood Legal Services Program, and an attorney with the Office of Criminal Justice at the Department of Justice.  Judge Wald clerked for the Honorable Jerome Frank on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She received her B.A. from the Connecticut College for Women and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Judge Wald has received more than 20 honorary degrees.


© 2003 Freedom Now
Email: info@freedom-now.org