Santa Clara University School of Law is pleased to announce Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) Executive Director Hadar Harris has been selected by T’ruah to receive the Raphael Lemkin Human Rights Award. The award presentation will be held in New York City on Monday, May 9th.
As T’ruah Executive Director Rabbi Jill Jacobs writes,
Hadar is a lifelong human rights activist. After being arrested at the Soviet Embassy as a young woman protesting on behalf of Soviet Jewry, she took time off from college when she was asked by the late Congressman Tom Lantos (D-CA) to become Executive Director of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, a bi-partisan legislative service organization of the House of Representatives. It was then that she deepened her work on behalf of Soviet dissidents, advocated for the cause of the Romani peoples (gypsies), and conducted a covert fact-finding mission to the Soviet Union. Hadar became the second woman ever to be elected International Chairperson of the World Union of Jewish Students in Israel. During that time, she traveled to Jewish communities around the world, working with student groups and community leaders to advocate for expanded enfranchisement of young Jewish leaders as well as advocacy on a range of human rights issues. Later, she was the Director of Program and Resource Development at the Association for Civil Rights (ACRI).
As a human rights attorney, Hadar has had a long and varied career specializing in issues of civil and political rights, gender equality, and domestic implementation of international norms. She has focused a large part of her personal work over the past decade on creating and growing the movement for Human Rights at Home, giving workshops, holding conferences, and designing projects to expand the fundamental understanding and application of human rights in the United States. She brings a comparative perspective of over 25 countries, with NGOs, governments, academics, and intergovernmental organizations.
Before coming to NCIP at Santa Clara Law, Harris was the Executive Director at the Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law. Learn more about NCIP and its work.
