2012 Northeast Regional Conference Morning Panels. North Africa and the Middle East

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1 2012 Northeast Regional Conference Morning Panels North Africa and the Middle East Two years of turmoil, violence, and dramatic change have transformed the political landscape in North Africa and the Middle East. This panel will explore the consequences of these popular uprisings and help explain their impact on democratic values and human rights. Karim Ben Khelifa is a photojournalist and the co-founder and CEO of Emphas.is, a website designed to promote crowdfunded visual journalism. For the past twelve years he has covered conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Le Monde, and Stern. He is spending the academic year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Rhonda Roumani is a freelance journalist who has covered Islam and Muslim-related issues both in the U.S. and abroad for over ten years. She worked as a special correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor from Syria. Her articles have appeared in a number of other publications, including the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Washington Times, the Financial Times, and the Boston Globe. She has also appeared on radio and television shows such as CNN International, NPR's "All Things Considered," and the Washington Post Radio. Before turning to freelancing, Ms. Roumani worked as a reporter for the Beirut-based Daily Star, where she focused primarily on Syria. She is currently a research associate at the University of Southern California s Center for Religion and Civic Culture where she is doing research on a generation of progressive Muslim-Americans leaders who began their journey in Islam in Egypt s jails more than fifty years ago, alongside some of the most radical Islamist thinkers of our day. Denis J. Sullivan is Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture, and Development at Northeastern University. His areas of study include Comparative Politics, Middle East Studies, Islamism, and Egyptian Politics. Ken Mayers (moderator) is the faculty advisor to the AI chapter at Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, NJ, and a member of the AIUSA Board of Directors. He is a country specialist on North Africa. The Rights of Immigrants and Refugees The presence of millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States has become a contentious issue in communities across the country. This panel will discuss many of the human rights issues involved, including the right to political asylum and efforts to promote the DREAM Act.

2 Shannon Erwin is State Policy Director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA), where she is responsible for MIRA s state-level legislative and administrative advocacy and provides training and technical assistance to secure and protect immigrants rights in Massachusetts. Her work focuses primarily on immigrant eligibility for health care, housing, education, public benefits, and state-funded services, and on immigrant access to the legal system and worker protections. In addition, Ms. Erwin oversees the New Americans Integration Institute, a project launched by MIRA in 2011 to advance immigrant integration by promoting naturalization, immigrant entrepreneurship, professional integration, and access to education. Carlos Rojas is on the National Coordinating Committee, New England, for United We Dream. Anita P. Sharma, Esq., is the Asylum Attorney at the Political Asylum/Immigration Reform Project (the PAIR Project). Ms. Sharma received her LL.M. in International Legal Studies from American University Law School, concentrating in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. She received her J.D., from Suffolk University Law School and received her B.A. in English Literature from Suffolk University. She serves as co-chair of the Liaison Committee on Asylum for the New England Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) and as co-chair of the Pro Bono Service Committee of the Boston Bar Association s Immigration Section. She received the BBA's John G. Brooks Public Service Award, in 2006, for her outstanding representation of asylum-seekers and for serving as a mentor to hundreds of pro bono lawyers who represent PAIR clients. Laura Wides-Muῆoz is the Hispanic Affairs writer for The Associated Press. Based in Miami, she covers U.S.- Cuba relations, immigration, and Hispanics in American politics and pop culture. She has reported from Cuba and Guatemala, where she was a Fulbright Scholar and covered the end of Guatemala s civil war. She has won The Associated Press Managing Editors Award for her beat and the Green Eyeshade Award for best political coverage in the southern United States. She has also written for the Miami Herald, U.S. News & World Report, and the Los Angeles Times. Ms. Wides-Muῆoz is spending the academic year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Ute Ritz-Deutch (moderator) has been an active member of AIUSA Group 73 in Ithaca, New York, for many years. She earned a Ph.D. in history from SUNY-Binghamton and currently teaches at Tompkins Cortland Community College. She is active in the Tompkins County Immigrant Rights Coalition.

3 Women s Rights In recent years Amnesty International and the broader human rights movement have placed an increasing emphasis on discrimination and violence directed against women. AI has worked to expose patterns of discrimination in Afghanistan, for example, and supported the Violence Against Women Act and the International Violence Against Women Act in the U.S. Congress. This panel will explore how we can best promote and defend the rights of women at home and abroad. Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi graduated from Wingate University with a B.S. in Sociology and Psychology in May Her Sociology Bachelor s thesis The Role of Women in the Post-Election Protests in Iran was published in the Wingate Review Fall Throughout her graduate studies at the New School for Public Engagement-Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy, she continued her research on women and marginalized groups, including ethnic/religious minorities, migrants, domestic workers, and sex workers. Ms. Golesorkhi s research emphasis lies in the field of human rights and governance. Her geographical expertise is primarily in the Middle East/North Africa and Southeast Asia. During the last year of her graduate studies, Golesorkhi conducted field research on women s and religious minority rights in Iran and Germany. In addition, her research analysis Occupying the patriarchal space in Iran: a case study on women s activism in contemporary Iran was selected in a nationwide call for papers by the The New School for Social Research for its Annual Politics Conference in April Ms. Golesorkhi is active in AIUSA as a country specialist on Saudi Arabia. She is also a member of the Northeast Regional Planning Group Tzili Mor served as a Gender Justice Adviser in Afghanistan with the International Development Law Organization where she worked with the country s first ever special prosecution Unit on Violence Against Women and to promote women s access to justice. Ms. Mor is an international human rights advocate and adviser with substantial experience in designing, implementing, and managing human rights, gender and rule of law projects, including law reform and advocacy via public interest litigation, proposed legislation, fact-findings, local and international advocacy, civil society building and networking. As Acting Director and clinical fellow at Georgetown Law s International Women s Human Rights Clinic, she supervised student- and partner-led legal research, litigation, UN interventions, and fact investigations on sex and race discriminatory laws in Africa, South America and the United States, covering intersecting issues of HIV/AIDS, housing, property, family law, land and inheritance, sex-discriminatory customary laws, and gender-based violence. Working as a regional human rights specialist with the American Bar Association based in Central Asia, she trained judges, lawyers and law students on domestic incorporation of international human rights standards, and helped launch the first national judicial corruption courtroom monitoring network in Kyrgyzstan. Ms. Mor has engaged UN bodies and global and local institutions

4 on human rights, law, and gender initiatives around the world, working with myriad national and international initiatives and organizations, including Amnesty International where she currently serves as a Coordination Committee member of the International Women s Human Rights Network. Ms. Mor holds a BA in Art History and Psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles, an MS in Foreign Service from Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and a JD and LLM in advocacy and international human rights law from Georgetown Law School. Zandile Nhlengetwa is spending this semester as the Oak Human Rights Fellow at Colby College in Maine. She is the principal of Ulusda School in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, a place of learning for young people, as well as a community center that organizes adults around issues such as gender inequity, sexual abuse, and violence. In a community marked not only by poverty but patriarchy and violence, Ms. Nhlengetwa works tirelessly to persuade families to allow their daughters to attend classes, and to encourage their sons to study rather than join local gangs or militia. As a dedicated human rights activist and a survivor of the political violence that affected her home province of KwaZulu-Natal, Zandile Nhlengetwa is known in her community for her ability to bring calm and stability to potentially volatile situations. Facing significant personal risk, Ms. Nhlengetwa has received numerous threats, and local police have reported, not always sympathetically, these come from individuals who believe she has interfered with people s customs and culture. As recently as March of this year, Ulusda School s security guard was shot in what is suspected to have been an attempt on Ms. Nhlengetwa s life. Before she began her work at Ulusda School, Ms. Nhlengetwa founded and directed an organization, the Harambe Women s Forum, made up of widows, like herself, whose husbands have died during bloody conflict in KwaZula-Natal. After the loss of family members to violent incidents, Nhlengetwa has reached out to young people to help them break the cycle of violence through education. The group has promoted reconciliation between families and neighbors, and reached out especially to young men and older boys at risk of joining the cycle of violence. In addition to her work on behalf of young people in South Africa, she was part of the team that spent time in Freetown sharing South African experiences to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone. After participating in South Africa s TRC ( ), she agreed to share her experiences in Sierra Leone, working with children who were asked to testify about their service as soldiers in that country s long civil war. Stephanie Williams (moderator) is a senior studying political science with an emphasis on international and comparative politics at Brown University. This past summer, she completed an internship with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, where she worked in outreach and communications. She is Amnesty International's Student Activist Coordinator for Rhode Island, a member of the

5 Northeast Regional Planning Group, and the Group Coordinator for the Brown University Chapter.

Charles H. Kuck Installed as President of AILA

Charles H. Kuck Installed as President of AILA Charles H. Kuck Installed as 2008-2009 President of AILA June 26, 2008 202-507-7649 today installed Charles ( Chuck ) Kuck as the President of AILA for the 2008-2009 term. Mr. Kuck, an immigration lawyer