HRP Awards 2021 Post-Graduate and Summer Fellowships
The Human Rights Program is pleased to present recipients of its 2021-2022 post-graduate and 2021 summer fellowships. This year, we have awarded Satter Human Rights Fellowships to three remarkable 2021 Harvard Law School graduates: Brooke Davies JD’21, Emily Ray JD’21, and María Daniela Díaz Villamil LLM’21. Made possible by a generous gift by Muneer A. Satter JD’87, this 12-month post-graduate fellowship is designed to support and promote human rights defense in response to mass atrocity or widespread and severe patterns of rights abuse.
Two current Harvard Law School students — Amre Metwally JD’22 and Kirin Gupta — will also undertake summer internships in human rights with funding from HRP. As guidance from Harvard University evolves and the world continues to reckon with the pandemic, summer fellowships will be undertaken remotely. Learn more about our post-graduate and summer fellowship recipients below.
2021-2022 Satter Fellows
Brooke Davies JD’21 will be a Satter Fellow in Human Rights for the 2021-2022 academic year. She will be joining the constitution-building team at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in Tunis, Tunisia. Her projects will involve assisting in the Yemeni peace process and the constitution-building process in Sudan. While at Harvard Law, Brooke was active in the negotiation and conflict resolution community. Through the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, she co-wrote a report on how protest movements can better negotiate with their political leadership titled, “Power, Protest, and Political Change.” She served as a Teaching Fellow for the Negotiation Workshop and the Harvard Divinity School class, “Negotiating Across Worldviews,” as well as a Research Assistant for the Comparative Constitutions Project. This spring, she will publish a report on the implementation of peace agreements through domestic law with the University of Edinburgh’s Political Settlements Research Programme. Before coming to HLS, Brooke was a speechwriter at the firm West Wing Writers.
María Daniela Díaz Villamil LLM’21 is feminist Colombian lawyer and scholar. For the 2021-2022 academic year, she will be a Satter Fellow in Human Rights with the International Center for Transitional Justice in Uganda, where she will focus on combatting conflict-related gender and sexual based violence. Daniela received an LL.B. (Hons) from Universidad Externado de Colombia, where she routinely worked as a Researcher and Undergraduate Legal Program Instructor (International Human Rights Law). She has also contributed work toward an MSc in Political Studies at the National University of Colombia (degree pending) and an LL.M at Harvard Law School (degree pending). Currently, she works as a research assistant to the United Nations Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, focused on conflict, peace, and security. Before HLS, she was the Coordinator of the Peace and Armed Conflict Team at Colombia Diversa (2018-2020), as well as a full-time visiting researcher in the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas (UNAM). Daniela is also the author of The Orders of Prejudice: Systematic Crimes Committed Against LGBT people in Colombian Armed Conflict (2020).
Emily Ray JD’21 specializes in international law and human rights at Harvard Law School. This coming year, Emily will be working with Partners in Justice International (PJI) to strengthen access to justice for victims of atrocity crimes in their home countries. She will also continue to build on her work on Myanmar which she began as a student attorney in the HLS International Human Rights Clinic. As a Satter Fellow, her project is focused on accountability for grave crimes in Myanmar. She will be working to strengthen the networks between civil society and international judicial mechanisms to enhance the justice process and protect the legal interests of vulnerable parties. Prior to attending HLS, Emily received her master’s degree in Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy from the University of St. Andrews, where she wrote on how to conceptualize individual responsibility for structural human rights violations.
2021 HRP Summer Fellows
Kirin Gupta is JD/PhD student who is writing a dissertation about women terrorists in the former British Empire. She is a legal historian committed to global intersections of race, gender, and sexuality as defined and controlled by extra-legal and legalized violence. Kirin began her JD during the pandemic in the Fall of 2020, and has a strong investment in human rights, international law, and reproductive justice. This summer, she is working at Rights & Security International (RSI) on a 2021 Human Rights Summer Fellowship. Her work follows RSI, a UK-based human rights organization, in focusing on sweeping injustices committed in the name of counter-terror. Over-inclusive policies that especially harm women and young people are a significant part of the growing case to be made against the way the war on terror is currently being fought. She will be leveraging her research and background to help develop the emerging gender-based violence focus within RSI.
Amre Metwally JD’22 is a Harvard Law School student interested in the intersection of technology and human rights. Prior to law school, Amre lived in Turkey as a Fulbright Scholar, worked for a human rights non-profit, and ultimately was a Policy and Enforcement Manager for political extremism at YouTube. While in his role there, Amre also helped advocate for critical changes to preserve human rights content uploaded from Syria. At Harvard Law School he’s been involved with the Middle Eastern Law Students Association, the Berkman Klein Center, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Harvard Human Rights Journal, and Advocates for Human Rights. His current research and writing have focused on internet referral units and government attempts to censor social media content; he has an article on the subject forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology. Amre also recently completed a writing project that provided a critical look at the ways in which orthodox narratives of terrorism are created, legitimated, and disseminated through the use of experts and counter-terrorism intelligence services in the content moderation industry in Silicon Valley. He will work this summer with Social Media Exchange, a digital rights group for the Middle East and North Africa based in Beirut, Lebanon.