Azadeh N. Shahshahani is an American human rights attorney based in Atlanta. She is the legal and advocacy director for Project South. She previously served as president of the National Lawyers Guild and director of the National Security/Immigrants' Rights Project for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Georgia.
Shahshahani was born in Tehran a few days after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. [1] She received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where she served as article editor for the Michigan Journal of International Law . Shahshahani also has a master's degree in modern Middle Eastern and North African studies from the University of Michigan.
Shahshahani has worked for two decades in the U.S. South to protect the human rights of immigrant, Black, and Muslim communities. [2] [3] [4]
She is the author or editor of several human rights reports, including the report Imprisoned Justice: Inside Two Immigrant Detention Centers in Georgia; [5] the report Inside Atlanta's Immigration Cages, [6] which helped persuade the City of Atlanta to stop detaining immigrants for ICE at the city jail; as well as the 2020 Project South complaint [7] that brought national and international attention to medical abuses against women's bodies at the Irwin County Detention Center.
Shahshahani has also served as counsel in lawsuits on behalf of a deported U.S. citizen, a Muslim woman forced to remove her head covering at a courthouse, detained immigrants subjected to forced labor at the corporate-run Stewart Detention Center, immigrant women survivors of medical abuse at the Irwin County Detention Center, and many others who have suffered human rights violations. [8] [9] [10] [11]
Shahshahani has served as a trial monitor in Turkey, an election monitor in Venezuela and Honduras, and as a member of the jury in people's tribunals on Mexico, the Philippines, and Brazil. She has appeared before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to testify about medical abuse against migrant women at the Irwin County Detention Center. She has also participated in international fact-finding delegations to post-revolutionary Tunisia and Egypt as well as a delegation focused on the situation of Palestinian political prisoners.
Shahshahani serves on the advisory council of the American Association of Jurists. She previously served as a board member of Defending Rights & Dissent. [12]
She speaks frequently at law school and college campuses on topics ranging from movement lawyering to roots of forced migration, U.S. foreign policy, abolition of ICE prisons, and countering state surveillance and repression against Muslim communities, among others.
Shahshahani has appeared on Democracy Now! and BBC; has been interviewed by NPR and The World; and has been quoted by The New York Times , The Washington Post , CNN, The Guardian , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution , and other outlets.
Shahshahani writes frequently for various national and international publications such as The Nation , The Guardian, Al Jazeera, HuffPost , Salon.com , Slate , and Time on a range of issues pertaining to immigrants' rights, discrimination and state surveillance targeting Muslim communities, and using the international human rights framework as a tool for liberation.
Shahshahani is the recipient of the Shanara M. Gilbert Human Rights Award from the Society of American Law Teachers, the National Lawyers Guild Ernie Goodman Award, the Emory Law School Outstanding Leadership in the Public Interest Award, the Emory University MLK Jr. Community Service Award, the US Human Rights Network Human Rights Movement Builder Award, the American Immigration Lawyers Association Advocacy Award, the Fulton County Daily Report Distinguished Leader Award, and the University of Georgia School of Law Equal Justice Foundation Public Interest Practitioner Award, among others. She has also been recognized as an abolitionist by the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University & the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, and as one of Atlanta's 500 Most Powerful Leaders by Atlanta magazine. In 2016, she was chosen by the Mundo Hispanico newspaper as a Personaje Destacado del Año (Outstanding Person of the Year) for defending the rights of immigrants in Georgia. [13] In 2017, she was chosen by Georgia Trend magazine as one of the 40 under 40 notable Georgians.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. ICE's stated mission is to protect the United States from the cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety.
The protection of basic human rights is enshrined in Constitution of Malaysia. These include liberty of the person and prohibition of slavery and forced labour. At the national level, legislative measures that exist to prevent human rights violations and abuses can be found in acts and laws on issues that either have a human rights component or relate to certain groups of society whose rights may be at risk of being violated. Human rights groups are generally critical of the Malaysian government and the Royal Malaysia Police. Preventive detention laws such as the Internal Security Act and the Emergency Ordinance 1969 allow for detention without trial or charge and as such are a source of concern for human rights organizations like Suara Rakyat Malaysia.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is a progressive non-profit legal advocacy organization based in New York City, New York, in the United States. It was founded in 1966 by Arthur Kinoy, William Kunstler and others particularly to support activists in the implementation of civil rights legislation and to achieve social justice.
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The Tahirih Justice Center, or Tahirih, is a national charitable non-governmental organization headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, United States, that aims to protect immigrant women and girls fleeing gender-based violence and persecution. Tahirih's holistic model combines free legal services and social services case management with public policy advocacy, training and education.
Martha Albertson Fineman is an American jurist, legal theorist and political philosopher. She is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Fineman was previously the first holder of the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School. She held the Maurice T. Moore Professorship at Columbia Law School.
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) is a non-profit legal services organization in Washington state. NWIRP's mission is to promote justice by defending and advancing the rights of immigrants through direct legal services, systemic advocacy, and community education.
Ziglar v. Abbasi, 582 U.S. ___ (2017), is a Supreme Court of the United States case in which the Court determined, by a vote of 4–2, that non-U.S. citizens detained in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks cannot recover monetary damages from high level federal officials for the conditions of their confinement. The case was consolidated with Hastey v. Abbasi, and Ashcroft v. Abbasi. It was argued on January 18, 2017.
The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) is a US non-profit international human rights organization based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1998, CJA represents survivors of torture and other grave human rights abuses in cases against individual rights violators before U.S. and Spanish courts. CJA has pioneered the use of civil litigation in the United States as a means of redress for survivors from around the world.
Indefinite detention is the incarceration of an arrested person by a national government or law enforcement agency for an indefinite amount of time without a trial. The Human Rights Watch considers this practice as violating national and international laws, particularly human rights laws, although it remains in legislation in various liberal democracies.
The Southern Regional Council (SRC) is a reform-oriented organization created in 1944 to avoid racial violence and promote racial equality in the Southern United States. Voter registration and political-awareness campaigns are used toward this end. The SRC evolved in 1944 from the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. It is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
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Jessica Colotl is an undocumented immigrant to the United States whose 2010 arrest for driving without a license and possible deportation called attention to the issue of illegal immigration. Colotl was brought from Mexico by her parents without valid documentation into the US when she was either 10 or 11 years old. Colotl became the center of debate over immigration policy, including the enrollment of non-citizens in state universities and discussion of Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g) which allowed police to turn her over to immigration enforcement.
Mary Kerry Kennedy is an American lawyer, author and human rights activist. She is the seventh child of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy. During her 15-year marriage to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, from 1990 to 2005, she was known as Kerry Kennedy-Cuomo. She is the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a non-profit human rights advocacy organization.
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Georgia House Bill 87 is an anti-illegal immigration act passed by the Georgia General Assembly on April 14, 2011, and signed into law by Georgia governor Nathan Deal on May 13, 2011. It took effect on July 1 of that year. The law was authored by Peachtree City Republican state representative Matt Ramsey, and was partly based on Arizona's SB 1070 bill that had passed the previous year.
Marty Rosenbluth is an immigration lawyer and civil rights activist.
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