CHRGJ is proud to congratulate our colleague Sarah Knuckey for her recent appointment at Columbia Law School as faculty co-Director of the Human Rights Institute, Director of the Human Rights Clinic, and Lieff Cabraser Associate Clinical Professor, a position she will start July 1, 2014. Knuckey is currently an adjunct professor of the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law and Director of the Center’s project on Human Rights Fact-Finding and its Project on Extrajudicial Executions.

“Columbia has made an outstanding choice in selecting Sarah Knuckey to lead its International Human Rights Clinic,” says Margaret Satterthwaite, one of the Center’s Faculty Directors and Clinical Professor of the Global Justice Clinic, with whom Knuckey is co-teaching in Spring 2014. “Sarah is a visionary human rights advocate and has been an inspiring teacher, mentor, and supervisor to our students. We will miss her enormously, but look forward to continuing collaborations.”

Knuckey’s work has included fact-finding missions and reporting on human rights and humanitarian law violations around the world, including in Afghanistan, Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, and the United States.  Her investigations and legal and policy work address unlawful killings, armed conflict, sexual violence, corporate abuses, and assembly/expression rights.

“In almost seven years at NYU, Sarah Knuckey has been an exceptional colleague.  She is deeply knowledgeable, and consistently at the cutting edge of new developments in the field,” says Philip Alston, one of the Center’s co-Chairs, who also worked closely with Knuckey during his mandate as UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions (2004-10). “She combines a deep passion for human rights with a determination to critically examine the received wisdom and bring a high degree of professionalism to bear on advocacy.  We are delighted that she will be staying in New York City and congratulate Columbia on a superb appointment.”

Knuckey is also one of the founding editors of Just Security, an online forum that launched in September 2013, that provides analysis of U.S. national security law and policy.

“Sarah is unsurpassed in her potential to shape the next frontier of human rights clinical education,” says Ryan Goodman, one of the Center’s co-Chairs and co-founder of Just Security. “It is no wonder that she has so quickly become one of the most important voices on the issues of our times, and no surprise that Columbia would choose such a leader in the field of human rights and humanitarian law to head their program. I look forward to continuing to work with Sarah in the years ahead.”

CHRGJ wishes Professor Knuckey great success in her new position at Columbia Law School and looks forward to watching her continue to lead the field in human rights research and clinical work.

Prior to working for CHRGJ, Knuckey was a Clerk to the Hon. Justice Michael Kirby at the High Court of Australia, Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar, Lionel Murphy Postgraduate Scholar, Harvard Human Rights Program Summer Fellow, and Everett Public Interest Internship recipient (at Human Rights Watch). She has a BA and LLB (Hons) (University of Western Australia), an LLM (Harvard).