HRP Awards 2019-2020 Post-Graduate Fellowships
The Human Rights Program is pleased to present its 2019-2020 Post-Graduate Fellowship Cohort. This year, we have awarded Satter and Henigson Fellowships to five remarkable 2019 Harvard Law School graduates: Terence (Terry) Flyte, Imani Franklin, Rez Gardi, Daniel Levine-Spound, and Nerissa Naidoo. HRP’s post-graduate fellowships are designed to help launch the careers of students who have demonstrated great promise as advocates and shown dedication to human rights while here at the Law School. Learn more about the new fellows and their projects below.
Terence Flyte LLM’19 is a Satter Fellow in Human Rights who will work with Legal Action Worldwide in Beirut, Lebanon. During his fellowship, Terry will represent survivors of sexual violence perpetrated during the Syrian civil war. He will focus on empowering survivors to advocate for themselves, establishing survivors’ associations, and assisting these associations in planning and carrying forward their pursuit for justice. In a partnership project between LAW and the Mukwege Foundation, Terry will contribute to a reparation and rehabilitation framework for survivors of sexual violence. He will also assist in preparing the case for Shanti Mohila, a group of Rohingya women subjected to sexual violence during clearance operations in Myanmar, in proceedings before the International Criminal Court.
Terry developed a commitment to tackling sexual violence while working on a clinical project researching conflict-related sexual violence in situations of detention in the International Human Rights Clinic, as well as during his time as a member of the legal team for the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. He has a strong interest in access to justice issues, having been involved in projects aimed at improving the treatment of vulnerable individuals in UK social security appeals, and highlighting problems in immigration detention hearings in Scotland. As passionate writing about international law as practicing it, Terry was one of the legal researchers that contributed to Oppenheim’s “International Law Volume III.” He holds an LLB with First Class Honours from the University of Glasgow.
Imani Franklin JD’19 is a joint JD-MPP student at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. As a Satter Fellow, she will work with the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) in Beirut, Lebanon. At IRAP, she will focus on transitional justice and resettlement for Syrian refugees. In this capacity, she will work with Syrian human rights defenders to document the abuses they’ve faced in hopes of seeking accountability for perpetrators and seeking safe resettlement to third countries.
During law school, she served as a clinical student in the International Human Rights Clinic and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic. She is a member of HLS’s IRAP chapter, the Black Law Students Association, and the Harvard Law Review. Over the summers during graduate school, Imani has interned with: the Southern Center for Human Rights, Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG), DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Labor and Social Development, and Mercy Corps in the West Bank and Gaza. She previously worked at the Ford Foundation and with the youth empowerment nonprofit Think Unlimited in Amman, Jordan. Imani graduated in 2013 from Stanford University, where she majored in international relations and minored in Arabic.
Rez Gardi LLM’19 is a Satter Fellow in Human Rights who will work with the Free Yezidi Foundation in Duhok, in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. During her Fellowship, Rez will gather evidence of the targeted genocidal campaign carried out by ISIS against the Yezidis, including mass executions, kidnapping, torture, sexual violence, and other egregious human rights abuses, using a victim-centric approach. This evidence will be used to build cases in collaboration with relevant European and Iraqi/Kurdish authorities to prosecute the perpetrators.
Rez is a Fulbright Scholar from New Zealand. During her time at HLS she was involved in the International Human Rights Clinic, served as Co-Director for Programming for Advocates for Human Rights, as an Executive Article Editor for the Human Rights Journal, and held various positions on the International Law Journal, and Women’s Law Association.
Prior to HLS, Rez worked as a legal officer at the New Zealand Human Rights Commission; as a solicitor in the disputes and litigation team of New Zealand’s preeminent law firm; and as a human rights intern at the United Nations Human Settlements Program in Nairobi, Kenya. As a former refugee, she is passionate about supporting young refugees and founded Empower Youth Trust to address the underrepresentation of refugees in higher education. She holds an LLB (Honours) and a BA double majoring in international relations and criminology from the University of Auckland.
Daniel Levine-Spound JD’19 is a Satter Fellow in Human Rights who will work with the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) in Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo on their Peacekeeping Program. At HLS, Daniel spent three semesters in the International Human Rights Clinic, served as co-President of Advocates for Human Rights, co-founded the Progressive Jewish Alliance, and conducted research with several professors on international humanitarian law, counterterrorism, and disarmament. He recently co-authored a book, A History of the Criminalization of Homosexuality in Tunisia, tracing the history and contemporary application of the Tunisian sodomy law.
Prior to law school, Daniel worked at the Euro- Mediterranean Human Rights Network and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies in Tunis; taught high school English and interned at Human Rights Watch on a Fulbright grant in Paris; and worked as a researcher at C Global Consulting, where he designed a course in conflict resolution. He graduated from Brown University with honors in Comparative Literature in 2012.
Nerissa Naidoo LLM’19 is a Fulbright scholar from Durban, South Africa. As a Henigson Fellow, she will work at Social Media Exchange (SMEX) in Lebanon. SMEX focuses on Internet policy research and digital advocacy in the Middle East and globally. From issues around freedom of expression and open governance to privacy and surveillance, Nerissa will contribute to SMEX’s work in advancing human rights norms in a digital world. In particular, Nerissa will map and analyze the impacts of legal frameworks in digital environments, enabling civil society organisations and human rights defenders to view the operation of digital rights across jurisdictions around the globe.
Having grown up in the Global South and on the Internet, Nerissa has always been curious about the experiences of minorities online and is interested in the intersection of technology, identity and society. She’s blogged about ending violence against children for UNICEF, contributed to the Health Professions Council of South Africa’s Ethical Guidelines on Social Media Use for Doctors, and wrote her graduate dissertation on copyright protection for Black Twitter’s memes via cultural intellectual property principles. She serves as the Communications Director for Harvard Law School’s Advocates for Human Rights, the Social Media Chair for the Harvard African Law Association, and is also on the boards of the Harvard Human Rights and Business Association and Global South Dialogue. She graduated with her LLB degree summa cum laude from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in April 2018.