It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Rebecca Wright (right) as today's guest blogger.Rebecca is the Legal Advisor for the North African Litigation Initiative (NALI) at the Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). NALI aims to raise awareness of the African human rights system in six target countries: Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan. It assists human rights defenders from these countries to bring cases before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights by holding training workshops and hosting potential litigants at the Ordinary Sessions of the Commission. In her guest post below, Rebecca discusses this work and further describes a recent human rights defenders workshop that NALI hosted in Tunisia.
Rebecca joined EIPR in 2007 after receiving a Harvard Law School Heningson Fellowship. She worked in Egypt for a year before traveling to Afghanistan to conduct research on the cost of conflict for civilians for CIVIC, a Washington, D.C.-based nongovernmental organization. She returned to Afghanistan on two other occasions to work for the Afghan NGO Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium on workers’ rights, provincial governance, and women’s leadership. After also working in Qatar and Lebanon, Rebecca returned to EIPR in April 2010 in order to help establish NALI.
Rebecca earned her J.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation analysed the concept of female heroism in the autobiographies of British suffragists, and today she honors one of those women:
I would like my transnational foremother to be Sylvia Pankhurst [left]. I wrote one of the chapters of my PhD on her. She and the other suffragettes I studied inspired me to become a woman of action and to pursue causes that are just, including those outside the UK.
Pankhurst (1882-1960) joins other IntLawGrrls foremothers -- including her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst (prior posts) -- in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!
