Amanda Ghahremani

Amanda Ghahremani is an international human rights lawyer, a Co-Investigator with the Canadian Partnership for International Justice, and a Research Associate at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute. Her expertise includes international criminal law, corporate accountability, universal jurisdiction, and transitional justice, for which she was nominated as Canadian Lawyer Magazine’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers three years in a row. She works predominantly with survivors of atrocity crimes to help them seek legal redress.

Amanda is currently part of the counsel team representing Eritrean plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Nevsun Resources for its alleged use of forced labour and slavery at the Bisha gold mine. She is also leading a project on criminal accountability for Iranian atrocity crimes through universal jurisdiction prosecutions. Her recent work includes co-authoring the legal analysis on genocide for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, successfully leading the international campaign to release Iranian-Canadian political prisoner Prof. Homa Hoodfar from arbitrary detention in Iran, and filing complaints before OHCHR and other UN mechanisms on behalf of victims of torture, arbitrary killings, and enforced disappearances while serving as Legal Director of the Canadian Centre for International Justice. You can follow Amanda’s work on Twitter: @amandaghahreman

Amanda was profiled for ATLAS by Raquel Vazquez Llorente, Senior Legal Advisor at eyeWitness, a non-profit set up by the International Bar Association. Read more about Raquel’s career and work at the end of this profile. Follow Raquel on @vazquezllorente

===

What pulled you towards international human rights law as a career? And what were your first steps? 

Throughout the years, I have frequently asked myself why I am so drawn to international human rights work and my reflections always lead me back to my own origin story. 

I have often seen myself as a product of exile, and I don’t use this term lightly. I, like thousands of other first generation Iranian immigrants, was born outside of Iran after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. My parents initially settled in France, but after facing racism and widespread discrimination in both professional and social settings they moved to Canada, where I was born.  I then emigrated to the United States with my father and faced the volatility of the post-9/11 American immigration system, which enveloped my adolescence in precariousness. While I consider myself lucky to have been raised in two multi-cultural countries where I was ultimately able to thrive, I always felt cheated out of having a concrete, permanent “home” and belonging in a space that I didn’t need to carve out for myself.

As a result, my undergraduate, graduate, and legal studies all gravitated towards learning the root causes of conflict and the manner in which these conflicts affect people.In the U.S. and Europe, I studied diaspora cultures and integration policies. In Australia, I studied peace and conflict resolution and focused on the country’s inhumane offshore refugee and asylum policies. In Canada, I worked with women refugees who were victims of sexual and domestic violence. Eventually, I joined a small NGO that supported survivors of atrocity crimes, where I helped our clients seek legal redress domestically and internationally. This is where I connected deeply with my clients and realised I had found my niche. With the mentorship of my brilliant colleague, Matt Eisenbrandt, I eventually worked my way to becoming the Legal Director of the organisation before taking the leap last year to become a freelance consultant.

What would you say are the moments in your career of which you are most proud?

Working on redress for survivors of atrocity crimes involves a combination of international and domestic criminal law, human rights law, and civil litigation. There are very few forums available to survivors to hold their perpetrators accountable, and even then, the process is slow. So, the high points of my career so far are the moments where I felt I had an impact, where we pushed the law in the right direction and contributed to a concrete – even if small – victory for survivors of these crimes.

As a member of the counsel team representing plaintiffs in a lawsuit against a Canadian mining company for the alleged use of forced labour and slavery in Eritrea, our team set a ground-breaking precedent at the appellate level that Canadian companies can be sued in Canada for human rights abuses committed abroad. We are now awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court of Canada that will determine whether this lawsuit will proceed in Canada as the first of its kind.

I am also a co-investigator in a Canadian network of international legal scholars and practitioners who aim to strengthen Canada’s contributions to international justice. Along with Fannie Lafontaine– who is one of my mentors, a remarkable scholar, and a fellow Atlas Woman – we jointly led the drafting of an amicus brief to the International Criminal Court in support of the Court’s jurisdiction over the crime of deportation of Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh. This brief contributed directly to the Court’s decision to accept jurisdiction and open an investigation.

Finally, my career has taken a mindful turn towards the domestic as I co-authored the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls’ supplementary legal report on genocide. The National Inquiry spent two years across Canada hearing the testimonies of Indigenous survivors of gender-based violence and concluded that the root cause of the violence was an ongoing genocide against Indigenous peoples. Our legal analysis on genocide in the colonial context bolstered the Inquiry’s conclusions, contributed to a national conversation about genocide in Canada, and even resulted in the Canadian Prime Minister’s public acknowledgment of genocide. There is still a long road ahead for many settler-colonial countries, like Canada, to comply with international law in their relationships with Indigenous communities. I see an increasingly important role for international human rights lawyers in this context.

What are some of the challenges that you've had, and how have you tackled them? 

One of my greatest challenges so far as a lawyer is also the most transformative experience I have had in my career to date. In 2016, my aunt (who has been like a mother to me) was arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned in Iran on a short visit, accused of fomenting a feminist revolution because of her academic work. In that moment, my personal and professional worlds collided, and I embarked on what would become the most high-stakes and emotionally draining case of my life.

I was tasked with navigating the delicate balance between public and private advocacy on behalf of my aunt. With close and trusted colleagues, we launched an international solidarity campaign publicly and I was heavily involved in various diplomatic and domestic efforts to facilitate her release privately. As a young woman, it was initially a struggle to be taken seriously and respected despite my expertise – not just by government officials, but also by other activists and advocates who purportedly wanted to help our campaign. Many activists within the Iranian community refused to follow my directives about messaging, prioritising their own agendas and motives ahead of my aunt’s safety and freedom. Some even started to proactively work against our campaign, releasing unauthorised information about my aunt or publicly criticising our campaign strategies. I became very disillusioned with human rights activists and, when my aunt was finally released after 112 days in prison, I retreated from that space.

Throughout these last years, I have reflected on this traumatic time in my life where I was victimised like so many of my clients and their families. I truly understood what it felt like to be instrumentalised, to have your objectives and desires ignored, and to witness the lack of nuance and strategy employed by many people who occupy a large space in the field of human rights advocacy. Conversely, I also saw the best in many people: those who respected our family’s wishes and asked for consent every step of the way, those who offered discerning expertise, and those who were willing to roll up their sleeves and take direction based on our strategies. As much as I had empathised with my clients before, my experience taught me what it truly means to be a thoughtful, supportive, and strategic advocate. I have implemented those lessons in every case and client interaction I have had since.

Fortunately, not everyone needs to go through such an emotionally harrowing experience to learn these lessons. It simply requires more listening – to victims, to affected communities, to experts – before we take premature or impulsive actions in the name of a cause, especially in international human rights advocacy.

Why did you decide to establish yourself as an independent consultant and what’s the experience been like?

I am increasingly less convinced that NGOs are structurally sustainable, at least small, niche NGOs. I have commiserated with many friends and colleagues who work in this space – across all non-profit fields, not just justice – and both our experiences and the research demonstrate that we need to seriously re-conceptualise board management roles and funding models. I absolutely loved the mandate of my former organisation, and I believed deeply in its work, but I was doing three jobs for the salary of half of one person, just to keep the organisation running. This was not healthy for me, nor sustainable for the organisation. I spent more time in the day doing work that was outside the scope of my actual job title as Legal Director and I realised that this was a systemic problem, and it was preventing me from delivering the highest caliber of work I knew I was capable of producing. 

After careful reflection on my work style, expertise, skills, and interests, I decided that becoming a freelance consultant would allow me to fulfil three priorities in my work that were not previously being met: (1) I needed more autonomy over my work and decisions, so that I could produce the highest quality work; (2) I needed the time and space to do deep, intellectually stimulating work; and (3) I needed fair wages to be able to live healthily and support those in my life that depend on me. In December 2018, I took the leap and it was the best decision I could have made, for me.

Of course, being a consultant can come with other drawbacks (such as job insecurity) and it is not really an option for young lawyers who have not yet built the necessary experience and expertise to work on their own. I had already accumulated over a decade of professional experience in various facets of law, management, and the non-profit sector, and throughout this time I built relationships with people, organisations, and law firms who wanted to continue to work with me because they knew what I was capable of delivering. There is a lot of value in putting in time at institutions or boutique law firms to develop important skills. The lesson here is simply to recognise when your time in a particular workplace stops being mutually beneficial, so that you can move on to the next inspiring challenge.

What's your advice for people, particularly women, hoping to work in international law/ domestic human rights in the future?

Ask why: It is very important to ask yourself why you want to do this work and why you are the best person to do it. The most successful women I have met in this field have all had a purpose and a drive to create specific impact. In my own life, I constantly check in with myself to ask: Is my work useful in accomplishing the intended objective? Where can my expertise bring added value? How can I best contribute to cases and projects that require my set of skills? This has led me to do international law in a domestic setting in ways that I did not know were possible before. When you are guided by the specific work, you end up finding your niche more quickly and having more impact.

Support other women: We often speak about women supporting women; this applies just as much to junior lawyers as it does to senior ones. International law in practice is dominated by men and there are still systemic issues of sexism: undermining women, inadequately crediting or attributing women’s work, and toxic workplace environments that create and maintain professional insecurity for women – all of these heightened for women of colour. Senior women in the field should support young talent, but it is much harder to be generous with your time and opportunities when you feel precarious in your own position. The more we all elevate each other, the more opportunities there will be for all of us. Younger women in this field should understand these dynamics and support women that are more senior to them too, especially women of colour. And for those like me who are still in early-mid career, we need to be very conscious of both sides, but we also need support from both sides as we navigate these same patriarchal barriers. On that note, I would like to acknowledge and thank the wonderful Raquel Vazquez Llorente for choosing to profile me today.

For women from lower socio-economic backgrounds: I hear your frustration and I am with you. I had to work to put myself through all my degrees and early internships, and I am currently responsible for financially supporting my family. These added financial burdens, especially for immigrants and women of colour, are a very real obstacle to working in international or domestic human rights law. It is important for you to consider your personal situation and financial responsibilities when pursuing jobs in this field, especially because most of these jobs (very problematically) barely pay a living wage. Spending time early in your career in a more mainstream or boutique law firm can offer some financial stability, teach you valuable professional skills, and serve as a springboard into the work that you are truly passionate about. That being said, if you choose this route, it is crucial that you do not compromise your values in the process (i.e. do not uphold structures that contribute to human rights violations) and that you stay connected to the human rights field through pro bonoor grassroots activities. In fact, there are small and mid-sized law firms that have social justice or human rights practices, find them!

Amanda Ghahremani was profiled for ATLAS by Raquel Vazquez Llorente. Raquel is a Senior Legal Advisor at eyeWitness, a non-profit set up by the International Bar Association that provides technological and legal expertise for the documentation of core international crimes. Raquel has worked in conflict and post-conflict environments in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia on a range of international criminal law and human rights issues—mostly focusing on state abuse of power and large scale violations. She is a lawyer and a member of the Justice Rapid Response Roster for the deployment of experts in mass atrocities investigations. Raquel holds an MSc in International Strategy and Diplomacy from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and an Advanced Degree in Law and Business Administration from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law, and at the Bonavero Institute at the University of Oxford. @vazquezllorente