Jamil Dakwar

Jamil Dakwar is international human rights lawyer and expert. He is currently the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program. Jamil’s current research interests and legal advocacy are focused on racial and economic justice, mass incarceration, police violence, and extreme sentencing.   Jamil frequently conducts advocacy before the U.S. government on human rights issues, with a particular focus on the domestic implementation of U.S. human rights obligations. His expertise frequently appears in domestic and international media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Public Radio International, Business Insider, The Intercept, and Al Jazeera English. He serves as the ACLU’s main representative to the United Nations and leads the ACLU’s advocacy before other regional and international bodies, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Jamil was one of ACLU’s first legal observers to the military commission system at Guantanamo Bay in 2004. In 2020, he was appointed as a member of the New York State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.   Prior to joining the ACLU in 2004, Jamil worked at Human Rights Watch, where he conducted research, advocated, and published reports on issues of torture and detention in Egypt, Morocco, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territory. Before coming to the United States, he was a senior attorney with Adalah, a leading human rights group in Israel, where he filed and argued human rights cases before Israeli courts and advocated before international forums. He has taught human rights courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), Bard College, and Hunter College. He is trilingual and speaks Arabic (mother tongue), English, and Hebrew.