This month, as I conclude 12 years of service with the international law firm Dentons, I am opening a new chapter in my career by joining a new global law practice. To all the Dentons attorneys and staff that invested in my career over the past decade: Thank You. To all the clients who entrusted me with their legal affairs: Thank You.
There was never a quiet moment in my 12-year career with Dentons. From my first year as a junior associate to my twelfth year as a senior consultant, I was detailed to advise on some of the most groundbreaking projects in the Middle East, from multibillion-dollar public-private partnerships to international investigations across a dozen jurisdictions to advising on the burgeoning field of international human rights law. Throughout the journey, I had the privilege of working on landmark cases that will shape the future of the Middle East for generations to come.
As I close this chapter in my legal career with Dentons, I want to highlight the firm’s advocacy work on behalf of the most vulnerable segments of society. There is a scripture that has always moved me. It is from the book of Isaiah, one of the prophets of the world’s three major monotheistic faiths. Isaiah writes, “Learn to do right. Seek justice. Free the oppressed. Defend the cause of the orphan. Plead the case of the widow.” It is the work at Dentons that pled the case of the vulnerable and invisible that I want to spotlight here.
I can fill many pages with examples of our award-winning work as we pioneered human rights advocacy across the Middle East in ways that had never been done before, by establishing legal clinics in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Lesvos for refugees fleeing armed conflict in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and beyond and by setting up partnerships with international organizations and NGOs to advise on international human rights and humanitarian law. I will forever be grateful to all the Dentons attorneys across the Middle East who selflessly donated their time to those initiatives.
One example I will highlight is the legal clinic we co-founded on the Greek Island of Lesvos, photographed above, with a consortium of other law firms. I served as a volunteer project lawyer for that project in 2017, where I advised over 100 refugees and asylum seekers on the Refugee Convention and family reunification under the Dublin Regulation. That work made a significant and concrete positive impact on countless lives. In the Lesvos project alone, approximately 70% of clients supported were granted asylum. That’s more than double the national average in Greece. It’s a testimony to the value of legal advocacy and representation, and how lawyers can leverage the law as a tool to promote justice and human rights.
I vividly recall my visit to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in 2015 with a box of wooden stars painted in beautiful, bright colors by attorneys and staff in Dentons’ New York and Middle East offices. The stars bore messages such as “hope,” “peace,” “courage,” “safety” and “light,” written in Arabic and English. I visited refugee camps throughout northern Iraq, where I distributed those “Stars of Hope.” I still remember the excited look of the face of each Iraqi child as I handed them a Star of Hope. Their eyes lit up as though I had given them a priceless treasure.
Dentons partnered with the Norwegian Refugee Council in establishing legal clinics across the Middle East that supported refugees living in informal tented settlements and UNHCR refugee camps, like the one photographed below.
As the Iraqi security forces recaptured large swathes of territory that had been previously occupied by ISIL in 2016-2017, thousands of suspected members of ISIL were detained. The Iraqi courts were preparing to try them for the international crimes that they had committed. They looked for instructors to teach judges international humanitarian law and international criminal law as they prepared for the first-ever war crimes trials to be held in Iraq. Judges had no experience in adjudicating war crimes, crimes against humanity and other international crimes; international criminal law had not yet been domesticated into Iraqi law. I was tapped by the United Nations to teach those courses in Arabic to prosecutors, police investigators and judges, who would be adjudicating those cases. I gave workshops both virtually and in person across Iraq, both through UNITAD and later with UNAMI, as shown in the picture below with Iraqi police investigators.
Following the conclusion of those trainings, I attended dozens of the trials of captured members of ISIL by courts interspersed throughout Iraq as a trial monitor through a program jointly developed by the Clooney Foundation for Justice and the UN. I served as the eyes and ears of the international community, ensuring that the due process rights of detained members of armed groups were upheld.
Some of those trials echo in my mind like a bad dream that keeps returning to haunt me. I remember the trials of young boys, some barely teenagers, who were being charged on suspicion of terrorism. Those boys were born into armed conflict in the late 2000s and early 2010s. They never saw a day of peace in their lives. They fled Mosul after ISIL’s occupation in 2014, making Al-Hol refugee camp in northeast Syria their homes. When Al-Hol camp became overrun by ISIL in the last couple of years, the Syrian Democratic Forces began dismantling the camp and deporting refugees back into Iraq. Those boys were among those forcibly returned to Iraq, but rather than being reintegrated into Iraqi society, they were detained on suspicion of having joined ISIL. Attending those trials as a trial monitor, and witnessing some of the detainees, some of them still young teenagers, break down in tears during interrogations before investigative judges, reminded me of the fragility of the human condition, and the extent of the tragedy unfolding all around us as armed conflict rages on in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, in Sudan and beyond. Those young children, victims of the failure of the international community to provide them with the safe, loving and nurturing environments that every child needs to flourish and thrive, have been robbed of their childhoods, loaded with burdens too heavy to bear.
I can only hope that our work as advocates for prisoners, for the detained and for refugees has brought hope to the vulnerable. I believe it has, and am grateful to Dentons for relentlessly supporting my work over the past decade, both by financially supporting my projects and by allowing me a flexible work arrangement and time off to pursue human rights advocacy through the United Nations and partner organizations, and for all those who volunteered countless hours on a pro bono basis to UN Women, the Clooney Foundation for Justice, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Public International Law and Policy Group, the International Law Institute, the International Refugee Assistance Project and the International Development Law Organization.
My hope is that the work I have done will inspire in others a love for international human rights law and fall in love with the field as I have. There is both truth and beauty in the idea of universal, first order, inherent rights that we all enjoy at all times, simply by virtue of our being human, rights that cannot be earned, lost or altered. Rights based on the equal moral status of all individuals, rights to life, equality and human dignity; gifts freely given to us, simply by virtue of our being human. This is a remarkable idea, a beautiful one that I hope every attorney will find worthy of defending.
