Board of Directors

Aryeh Neier (ex officio), Chair, has been President of the Open Society Institute since September 1993. Prior to joining the Open Society Institute, Aryeh Neier served for 12 years as Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. Before that, he spent 15 years at the American Civil Liberties Union, including eight years as national Executive Director. Mr. Neier has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University for more than a dozen years. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and has published in periodicals such as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation and Foreign Policy. Mr. Neier has contributed more than a 150 op-ed articles in newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune and articles that have appeared in newspapers in many countries. Author of six books, Mr. Neier has also contributed chapters to more than thirty-five books. Mr. Neier, a naturalized American, was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee at an early age. He is the recipient of six honorary doctorates, the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award and the International Bar Association’s Rule of Law Award.

Chaloka Beyani is a Senior Lecturer in International Law and Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he has taught since 1996. He has taught International Law and Human Rights at Oxford (1991-1995) and at the University of Zambia (1983-1988). His publications are in Public International Law, Human Rights, the movement of persons and populations, territorial disputes, legitimacy of states, migrants, African legal systems and constitutional reforms. He is an International UN Expert on Population Transfers, Mercenaries and Private Military Companies, Sexual and Reproductive Health and the Human Rights Approach to Development. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at LSE, a member of the Advisory Council of the Commonwealth Institute and the Africa Advisory Committee for Open Society Justice Initiative. He sits on the Board of Interights and the International Minority Rights Group. He is a former member of the Board of Oxfam (1993-1999).

Maja Daruwala is the Executive Director of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, an international NGO mandated to ensure the practical realization of human rights across the Commonwealth. She presently serves on several boards including the International Women's Health Coalition, the International Records Management Trust, the Commonwealth Policy Study Unit at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies; she is Chair of the Multiple Action Research Group (India). Her earlier services include being Chairperson of Minority Rights Group International and Chair and co-founder of People's Watch Tamil Nadu, a group that is particularly focused on ending torture. She is actively engaged in numerous other human rights initiatives and concentrates on issues relating to civil liberties including police reform, prison reform, right to information, discrimination, women's rights, freedom of expression, and human rights advocacy capacity building.

Anthony Lester QC is a practicing member of the English Bar and a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords. He specializes in constitutional and human rights law. He is independent adviser to the Justice Secretary on constitutional reform measures for the UK government. Lord Lester is a founder and President of Interights (the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights) and former chair of the European Roma Rights Center. He is a leading authority and co-editor of a major textbook on human rights law and practice. Anthony Lester was instrumental in the thirty-year campaign which led to the UK’s enactment in 1998 of the Human Rights Act which gave legal effect to the European Convention of Human Rights. He has recently introduced bills on civil partnership, equality, executive powers and forced marriages in Parliament. He was an architect of UK anti-discrimination legislation. He is an expert on constitutional and human rights law in Europe and the UK, and has argued many leading cases in the two European Courts and British and Commonwealth courts.

Jenny S. Martinez is an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, where she teaches international law, international human rights, constitutional law and civil procedure. Her current research focuses on international criminal law, terrorism and human rights, and the interaction of international and domestic legal institutions. In 2004, she argued Rumsfeld v. Padilla, one of the “enemy combatants” cases, in the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Professor Martinez worked as an associate legal officer at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague, where she worked with Judge Patricia Wald on criminal trials involving genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Professor Martinez also practiced law with the firm Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., where she focused on constitutional appellate litigation. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, Professor Martinez was also a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and to U.S Court of Appeals Judge Guido Calabresi.

Juan E. Méndez is the President of International Center for Transitional Justice. For 15 years, he worked with Human Rights Watch, concentrating his efforts on human rights issues in the western hemisphere. In 1994, he became general counsel of Human Rights Watch, with worldwide duties in support of the organization's mission, including responsibility for the organization's litigation and standard-setting activities. From 1996 to 1999, Mr. Méndez was the Executive Director of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica, and between October 1999 and May 2004 he was Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Between 2000 and 2003 he was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and served as President in 2002. From July 2004 - March 2007, Mr. Méndez served an appointment as the United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, a post that was complementary to his position as the president of the ICTJ.

Diane Orentlicher is on leave from August 2007 - August 2008. Diane is a Professor of International Law at the Washington College of Law, American University in Washington, D.C., where she has taught since 1992. She is also Director of the law school’s War Crimes Research Office and co-Director of the law school’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. Professor Orentlicher is an internationally recognized expert on crimes of war, human rights law and war crimes tribunals. She has published and lectured extensively on issues of accountability for human rights crimes, transitions to democracy, corporate responsibility in a transnational context, and the relationship between ethnic identity and political participation.

Wiktor Osiatyński is University Professor at the Central European University and a member of the Board of the Open Society Institute. Between 1991 and 2001 he was a recurrent visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School and has taught at other major universities in the United States. He has written widely on, among other topics, individual rights, the comparative history of social and political thought, and constitutional theory. His book, On Crimes and Punishments (2003) has initiated public debate about the need to reform law enforcement and the criminal justice system in Poland. His most recent book Citizens' Republic (2005) was a call for the formation of a strong civil society in post-Communist world.

Herman Schwartz, Professor of Law at American University, has worked for human rights both in the United States and abroad for over four decades. Since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, he has been advising numerous former Soviet bloc countries as well as emerging democracies elsewhere on constitutional, human rights, and other legal reforms as well as emerging democracies elsewhere. He has served as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission, and in June 1993, was one of four public members of the U.S. Delegation to the UN World Human Rights Conference in Vienna. In 1983, he founded and now administers the US/Israel Civil Liberties Law program, which is designed to train and develop a Jewish and Palestinian human rights bar in Israel. He is Co-Director of the Washington College of Law Human Rights Center, and has worked with many other domestic and foreign public interest organizations. He is the author of many books and articles on American and European constitutional and human rights issues.

Christopher E. Stone is the Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government where he chairs the program on criminal justice policy and management. His current research focuses on comparative approaches to police accountability and performance measurement in criminal justice systems. From 1994 to 2004, he served as director of the Vera Institute of Justice, where his work focused on institutional reform of police, prosecution, and public defense services both in the United States and internationally. Stone also serves as chair of Altus, an alliance of nongovernmental organizations and academic pursuing justice sector reform. In 2006, he was awarded an honorary OBE for his contributions to criminal justice reform in the United Kingdom.

Abdul Tejan-Cole was appointed the Commissioner of Sierra Leone's Anti-Corruptoin Commission (ACC) in November 2007. He previously served as the Deputy Director of the International Center for Transitional Justice's Cape Town office. He served as Chair of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) Board of Directors and as the Chair of the Board for West Africa Democracy Radio (WADR). His service on other boards includes the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI). He is a legal practitioner and a former president of the Sierra Leone Bar Association. He is a Yale World Fellow (2002). Mr. Tejan-Cole was a Human Rights Teaching Fellow at Columbia University (2000) and Appellate Counsel at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (2002-2004) and advised the Justice Sector Development program (2004-2006). He has published extensively on issues of human rights and international law.

Hon. Patricia McGowan Wald recently completed a term as a member of the President's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction which examined the state of pre-Iraq War intelligence and proposed reforms to the intelligence community. Previously, Judge Wald served on the 14-member panel in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 1999-2001. She was appointed to the post in 1999 by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. She previously served as Chief Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs in the Department of Justice. She is a council member and former Vice President of the American Law Institute. Judge Wald has traveled and consulted with Eastern European judicial and legal organizations for CEELI-American Bar Association. Her published works are extensive including articles on judicial administration, women’s rights, international and comparative law, legislative history, criminal procedure, juvenile law, administrative law (environmental review), judicial ethics and mental health law.

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