Mona Rishmawi

Mona Rishmawi is a Palestinian, Jordanian and Swiss lawyer, currently serving as a  Member of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Sudan. She is a former senior official at the United Nations, where she last served in 2022/2023 as Head of Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria based in Damascus, Syria.

From 2009-2022, Mona was Chief of the UN Human Rights Office’s Rule of Law, Equality, and Non-Discrimination Branch. From 2004 to 2009, she headed the Rule of Law and Democracy Unit and was the OHCHR Legal Advisor. Between 2004 and 2005, she was the Executive Director of the Secretariat of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, established by Security Council resolution 1564. Between 2000 and 2004, Mona was Senior Policy Adviser to two UN High Commissioners for Human Rights, including serving as the Senior Human Rights and Women’s Rights Adviser to Special Representative of the Secretary-General Sérgio Vieira de Mello in Iraq. From 1996 to 2000, she was the UN Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in Somalia.

From 1991-2000, Mona was the Director of the Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers at the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva. Prior to this, she practiced law from 1981-1991 in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territory, and played a senior role within a main Palestinian human rights organization, al Haq. Her academic publications cover human rights, international humanitarian law and international criminal law.

Follow Mona @monarishmawi.bsky.social and @RishmawiMona

Mona Rishmawi was profiled for ATLAS by Sareta Ashraph.

What drew you to working in international law/ domestic human rights law? And what were your first steps?

I am Palestinian, born in Gaza before 1967. My family had a very good life there until the 1967 war. I was quite young then and what I saw during that time shocked me. During the fighting, my family took shelter in my grandparents’ house. I remember when we were able to go back to our house, my mother kept shielding my eyes and telling me “Don’t look, don’t look”. But I did see a lot. There were bodies in the street, a lot of destruction. That has always stayed with me.

My mother is a refugee from Jaffa; my father came from the West Bank, from Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. In 1969, we moved to Ramallah. I finished my education there. My father, who was at one stage a journalist, stopped writing after 1967. Initially, this was because the newspapers were shut down. After a while they re-opened but under strict Israeli military censorship and so he did not continue. That impacted me quite a lot – that someone would stop expressing themselves because of a fear of censorship and fear of what would happen if he did truly express himself. I remember we even burnt some of his writings. After my father died in 2000, someone visited the family and came with some of his published works. For us, this was very valuable.

For those of us who remember life before 1967, the Israeli occupation was especially painful. We felt, feel, the injustice deeply. When I was a child before 1967, my family would go to the beach in Gaza, to spend time in the sun and water there. After the war we were not allowed to reach the beach for a long time as it was a closed military zone. For a while after the occupation, we had no books at school because the military authorities were going through the curriculum. The teacher had to dictate everything that we needed to know as there were no books. There were curfews. It was a very controlled life. My thinking was this was not fair, that people do not deserve to be made to live like this.

Despite all this, my thoughts cantered on how to achieve justice - not revenge. It was because of this, that law became important to me. At first, I was debating whether to go into law or journalism. My father was encouraging about my interest in journalism but, in the end, he said, “you saw what happened to me” and advised me to go into law. This choice was not straightforward as at the time there were no law schools in Palestine. I went to study in Egypt. It was a difficult period, but it was through those challenges that I became the person I am today. I was 17 years old, and it was not easy for Palestinians to travel. It also wasn’t easy to gain a place at an Egyptian university. To live under occupation at that early stage was very difficult. I am very grateful for Egypt for allowing me, allowing Palestinians, to be educated there.

After I completed law school in Cairo, I returned to Ramallah where I did my years of training at the main law firm in the West Bank. There was a military government in the West Bank, which was issuing military orders. But Palestinians didn’t know what those orders were and how they were impacting on the existing laws. A lawyer could go to court and be surprised to learn that there was a military order that had changed the law.

Two young Palestinian lawyers then began to collect these military orders, in an effort to understand the legal architecture that was being built by, and because of, the occupation. They wrote the first booklet setting out what the justice system put in place by the Israeli military occupation looked like and how one could operate within this system of justice. That document, The West Bank and the Rule of Law was published by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). It was through the work of these lawyers that Al Haq was established, became affiliated with the ICJ, and progressively became part of the international human rights movement.

I became very involved a bit later. My first steps in human rights work really came via work on rule of law – through trying to ensure some certainty, some transparency as to what the laws were and how they were being applied in the West Bank. As a young lawyer in the firm, part of my role at the beginning was to collect these laws, photocopy the operative part and stick it to the existing law that it was changing. It became almost like a puzzle, to uncover these Israeli military orders, understand their impact, and how they fitted (or didn’t fit) together. We now had to understand this new legal system that had been placed on top of us and that was now applicable to millions of people.

As a result of that work, I became one of the few people who understood what the law imposed on us was, how it was being applied, and the limited rights Palestinians have under these military orders. In al-Haq, we started then to develop short publications containing information for the Palestinians on topics such as their rights under occupation and how to submit complaints. I also started writing a weekly column in a local newspaper explaining the applicable law to the public. More than 70 such articles were published, passing Israeli military censorship.

At first, as lawyers at al Haq, we first were really trying to work out what the laws were and cataloguing the legal sources. We then started to document how the laws were being applied. After perhaps five or six years, we began to submit complaints. We would write to the Israeli military government to say, “This is what we have documented as having occurred. What is your response?” This made us explore international standards, notably the Geneva Conventions. And this is when my journey with international law began.

Al Haq was receiving a lot of complaints about torture inside Israeli detention centres and conditions in Israeli prisons. I and the other lawyers started to represent civilians who were tried before Israeli military courts or placed under administrative detention without charges or trial. It became an area of expertise as I was visiting prisons, talking to detainees and prisoners – who were often very young people– and documenting their accounts. It was a formative experience as we were all young lawyers at the time, intent on both documenting accurately what was occurring and speaking factually about violations. Through our work, we carefully followed evidentiary standards and developed a methodology and protocols around how interviews took place, how one would corroborate patterns of violations, and how to liaise with families. This was still in the 1980s so we didn’t have the advantage of the promulgated international best practices that exist now. And of course, there was limited capacity to learn from others working in other situations as not only was there no internet and contact with the outside world was monitored and surveilled.

Taking a break from this work, I was accepted into the LL.M. programme at Columbia Law School. This was an important moment for me because I always felt that, while I and my colleagues at al Haq were doing our best, there was a lot more to learn from other parts of the world. After my LL.M., I returned to the West Bank and to my work with al Haq, which had become better known and had gained credibility internationally. In 1989, al Haq received an award from US President Jimmy Carter. I travelled to Atlanta to receive the award on behalf of al Haq. It was one of the highlights of my life to meet President Carter. I was lucky to meet him several times afterwards, which was a huge privilege.

In 1991, I accepted a position at the ICJ to direct its Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of focus on the Middle East region. As I came from the region and was an Arabic speaker, Adama Dieng, the then ICJ Secretary-General, asked me to develop a programme focussed on the Arab world. This work provided an important opportunity for the still-disparate Arab human rights movement to come together. The entry point for this was the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. The ICJ used to organise the African Commission’s NGO forum, and so we invited the North African NGOs to this Forum. This opened a huge space for African and Arab movements to come together, to build solidarity. This experience left me with a deep belief in solidarity among human rights actors and movements. I saw it there with the Arab and African human rights movements, and I saw it again during the preparatory work for the World Conference on Human Rights, in Bangkok, witnessing how diverse Asian NGOs worked together to find common ground in human rights law and principles when drafting the Bangkok NGO Declaration on Human Rights.

I then participated in the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights. Out of that Conference came an emphasis on intersectionality, which –although the vocabulary was not as evident as it now–, was directed towards recognising the convergences of different forms of oppression. I was particularly happy with the focus and understanding of women’s rights as human rights, and on the emphasis on economic social and cultural rights, impunity and accountability. Later, when I worked on racism and the plight of people of African descent for the OHCHR, I saw the importance of this solidarity amongst movements and intersectionality, with people coming together to assert that all lives matter. The outcome of the World Conference included two important specific recommendations. The first was to establish what would become the position of High Commissioner for Human Rights. The second was to establish what would become the International Criminal Court.

By then, I was representing the ICJ at UN fora, particularly in what was then the Human Rights Commission. This allowed me to see the UN in action, and I became attached to the institution and wanted to help. In 1996, I was selected to be the Independent Expert on Somalia, while still working at the ICJ. I served in that position for four years. The human rights situation in Somalia was a tremendous challenge. It was through this work that I was introduced to the work of the United Nations on the ground. I saw how the UN was working to try to ameliorate the human rights situation in Somalia when almost everything was working against there being an improvement – warlords, no central government, active fighting, famine, lack of economic development, health disasters. After I completed my mandate in 2000, I joined the still relatively new Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and another path in my career started.

What do you consider to be the most impactful moments or the most personally meaningful of your career, and why?

I have already mentioned some of them. My time working in the West Bank before and as part of al Haq was one of the most important times of my life. Important because I was learning and developing as a young lawyer, but even more so because we were at the forefront of understanding how a military occupation was being structured and implemented. I could see that my education, my profession, meant something to the people we were trying to help. When we went to the military courts, when we gave parents an update on their detained sons, you could see that our work allowed them to have even a few minutes of relief. That was really important to me.

My work with the ICJ was also very personally meaningful. There, I felt deeply the solidarity of human rights activists and lawyers across different countries and different regions. My work with Al Haq and the ICJ also emphasised to me the importance of fact-finding –of documenting what was happening; corroborating the reported violations; engaging in a process of factual and legal analysis; of then providing to others an account of what has occurred. We were trying to prompt action, change but also creating a reliable historical record.

I feel very grateful that being a lawyer, and also working with the UN, has allowed to me to work on situations all over the world. This was not something I ever imagined was possible, given the strictures on Palestinians being able to move around the world. Through my legal work, I was able to learn from and about people from almost every region, and hopefully to have had a positive impact on their lives.

I became attached to fact-finding, as I can see how important this work is both in recognising the harm people have suffered and in conveying their experience to a wider community, including in spaces of power. It’s an integral part of helping victims and survivors find justice and relief – and underscoring their inherent dignity. For example, while with OHCHR, I worked on the human rights situation in Sri Lanka for nine years, documenting violations, meeting with the families of the disappeared, and pushing the government to address the deeply documented abuses. My work in OHCHR enabled me to do this. I felt, and still feel, a deep connection with many of the families of the disappeared. I have known them now for many years and some have become my friends.

And then there was the work in Syria, heading the Office of the UN Special Envoy in Damascus, which was different in nature but equally significant. It was a milestone. I lived in Damascus for over a year. This experience allowed me to see first-hand the complexity of political engagement. I was humbled by the resilience of the Syrian people who insist on not losing their dignity, while trying to surmount incredibly harsh conditions of life and protection challenges. I deeply felt, not only the vulnerability of Syrians, but also their strength and agency, not only in Damascus, but also in my travels across the country. The change of government last December offers a sliver of hope, but this hope can only yield results if the rich mosaic of Syrian society is respected and utilized and if the rights of all, particularly women and minorities, are not undermined.

In terms of impactful moments, two came as a direct result of the World Conference. The decision to establish OHCHR and the ICC brought the entire human rights movement together. I was part of the preparatory work for the Rome Conference representing the ICJ and part of the NGO Coalition. I remember it was 3am and we were in the corridors of FAO in Rome when we received the news that Philippe Kirsch had found a compromise that might work, and he was going to put it to a vote at the meeting that day. Seven hours later, at 11am, Philippe Kirsch came in with a document and said that he had put the document forward. We were waiting to see what the states would do. There was a procedural moment when the matter moved to a vote, a secret ballot. The motion carried. Against significant odds, the Rome Statute was agreed. I will never forget the euphoria which followed, and Emma Bonino dancing on the table. There was a real sense of standing inside a moment of history: of existing in the few seconds between a world before the ICC and a world after the ICC came into being.

Another moment that I think about a lot is when, as part of OHCHR, we convinced the Sri Lanka government to undertake national consultations regarding transitional justice. One of the consultations was with the families of the disappeared. I went to the consultation, and frankly I never thought I would see such a meeting occur. Hundreds of families came. One mother after another stood up and said, “This is my story, this is who I am, this is what happened to my family”. Present were families of those who had disappeared at the hands of the government as well as of the Tamil Tigers. Each of the mothers of course knew her own story but not necessarily the stories of the others. There was such an empathy amongst the families, regardless of who was responsible for their pain, regardless of their background. Unfortunately, the transitional process did not move forward as we hoped. But these are long roads.

I feel honoured to have been present at, and to have contributed to, the establishment of two pillars of international human rights law and international criminal law. I am equally, if not more greatly honoured, to have had the chance to sit in small rooms and tents in Palestine, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Sri Lanka, in Syria, in Sudan, with those who have suffered abuses and violations and to have done my best to provide them with dignity, truth, and a measure of justice. I have found meaning and hopefully had impact in my work at a local NGO, an international NGO, and within the UN system.

What are some of the challenges that you faced coming up in your career?

Of course I faced challenges, but I feel I had lots of opportunities as well. I have met so many people who opened doors for me. I have been lucky enough to be the first or among the first of someone of my background to do a number of different things in the international legal world. You can learn a lot, gain a lot, when you’re one of the first, but it does take a lot out of you. Sometimes I marvel that a girl from Gaza has had the life that I have had.

I worked on many difficult situations and one challenge is how it impacts on you, on your colleagues. This is a challenge I face every day, but nothing like we faced in Iraq in 2003. It was extreme though, sadly, not unique given the dangers people working to support vulnerable people living in conflict situation face every day.

That year, I was serving as the Senior Human Rights and Women’s Rights Adviser to UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General Sérgio Vieira de Mello in Iraq. My husband, Andrew Clapham, had taken a sabbatical and joined us in Baghdad as an Advisor to Sérgio on international humanitarian law. It was a challenging post, and the humanitarian situation was bad to start with. I did not realise until I saw it how difficult life in Iraq was due to the economic sanctions the population lived under. I was taken aback by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s (CPA) approach to de-Baathification, which led quickly to the insurgency.

On 19 August 2003, I was in my office at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, when a truck laden with explosives was driven into the hotel under Sérgio’s office. When the bomb exploded, it was chaos. It was the loudest sound I’d ever heard and then everything went black. Part of the building collapsed. I was injured, not life-threateningly, and was trying to find Andrew who luckily had been in a section of the building and so was not affected by flying debris. I was taken in a helicopter, accompanied by Andrew, to a US field hospital to get medical treatment. Twenty-three of my colleagues and friends, including Sérgio were killed. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then leader of  Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad,  claimed responsibility for the attack. He would later become the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq before being killed in 2006 by US forces.

The Canal Hotel bombing was a watershed moment for the United Nations in Iraq, and for the United Nations as a whole. For myself and for Andrew, we were lucky to be alive but had to contend with losing many people and the emotional toll of the bombing. It was again a moment where there was a before and an after – for us personally, but also for Iraq.

In the face of the entrenched and renewed violence in Sudan and in Gaza, how do you keep motivated?

It is painful to speak about what is happening in Sudan and in Gaza.

I think of Gaza a lot when I meet people in Sudan and in surrounding countries, when people tell me their experiences of dispossession, of being refugees, of losing all their belongings and homes, and of not being able to return home. The crimes that are unfolding before our eyes, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank are unimaginable. It is deeply emotional for me to talk about it, and I feel deeply affected by the reigning impunity. I want to believe that we all believe that everyone deserves to live in dignity, where our human rights are respected and that the Palestinians are not excluded from this paradigm. I know that at the end we will see freedom one day. I just hope that this day will come soon as the suffering must stop. Meanwhile, it is our obligation to make the law work for all, including Palestinians and to ensure that justice will prevail. 

Sudan was one of the first countries I worked on when I was with the ICJ in the aftermath of the 1989 coups d’etat. I later worked on the situation in Sudan again in 2003/ 2005. In 2003, I was the Executive Director of the Secretariat of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, established by the UN Security Council. From my visits to Darfur then, it was clear that we were looking at a crime scene and that it needed to be treated as such. For it to be treated as such, it needed to be recognised as a crime scene by the international community. Our recommendation led to the first referral of a situation by the Security Council to the ICC Prosecutor in 2005.

When the protests started in Sudan in September 2019, I was hopeful. By 2021, things had taken a worrying turn. I remember being in Syria in April and May 2023 listening on the radio to journalists interviewing people fleeing Khartoum. The stories they were telling were unimaginable, the level of brutality was difficult to comprehend. In December 2023, I was selected to be a Member of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Sudan. I am honoured to be selected and deeply feel that we must do our best to bring human rights and justice to Sudan. Unable to travel to Sudan for lack of government approval, our work has taken us to refugee camps in Chad, Uganda, and Kenya. It was disheartening that 20 years after the 2004/2005 Commission of Inquiry, we were again documenting the similar stories of killings, looting, rape, and destruction, perhaps with even more brutality. In 2004/2005, we were documenting attacks by men on horseback; now we are talking about drone attacks and greater use of technology and automatic weaponry.

In 2004 when we met people, they were usually villagers from rural areas, and it was difficult (but not impossible) to interview women as the men would interrupt the interview, interjecting their accounts. In our interviews now, Sudanese women have become a more evident force in society. Families, many who were displaced in 2003/2004, invested in girls’ education and many of those who were children in 2003 are now doctors, lawyers, activists, educators, and are tremendous advocates for their communities.

I am particularly moved when interviewing victims of sexual violence. I have done this work multiple times in the context of Darfur in 2004, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and now in Sudan again. Through this work, one can see clearly that justice is more than punishment. It is also about support for survivors who need urgent access to medical care, trauma counselling, legal aid, safe spaces and reparations. I do not think we pay enough attention to supporting the victims and survivors of such international crimes. In my opinion, this is a gap in the international arrangements that needs to be addressed. 

So you asked me what motivates me. It is mostly the strength of the people I meet in these difficult situations. Their struggle for dignity and security against all odds is what keeps me going. It gives me energy to fight for them.

Do you have any advice for people, particularly women, hoping to work in international law/ domestic human rights law in the future?

The foundation is to believe in yourself, believe in your vision. It is not enough to have other people believe in you, no matter how good that feels and how useful that may be. To dedicate yourself to building your confidence, your belief in yourself, is not always easy, but it is consistently life changing. I have a Charlie Chaplin pen that I always take with me on missions that has on it “you have to believe in yourself, that is the secret”.

Take care of yourself. I mean this in two different ways. First, nourish yourself by building skills, knowledge, networks. Work on your professional craft whether that’s by reading, writing, engaging in advocacy. Meet people whose work you admire and get to know those in your professional cohort who are building their careers and lives alongside you.

At the same time, you need to take care of your body and your mind, your inner self. A lot of what we do is very hard and it does exact a price. There is no getting away from that really. I walk a lot; I find a lot of peace in the benefits of being outside in the world. I also have developed a good sense of when I need to stop, to know when I can’t plough ahead. For example, recently the Security Council met on the situation in Sudan. I was in Geneva and with the time difference, I decided that not to watch it that night as I knew it would affect my sleep. I stepped away, had dinner, had a full night’s sleep, and watched it the following day. A lot of what one needs to do is very basic – don’t wait until you are exhausted and then start researching yoga retreats. Eat well, get a bit of exercise, and prioritise your sleep.

Embrace your ambition. When girls are young, they can be very vocal about what they want to be. But this impulse gets sort of hushed up, perhaps because for a long time ‘ambitious’ was not a compliment for a woman. But be proud of your goals, of what you want to make of yourself. Don’t be afraid of your ambitions and support the ambitions of others. Plan ahead and move forward. Life never goes in a straight line. When you experience a set-back and there will always be one, try to see the half full part of the glass. Reflect, learn from it, and stand up again and keep going forward.

If you are going to have a partner, choose well. Find someone who understands you and supports you and your ambitions. And you should also support their ambitions. There needs to be balance across the years of a relationship: it can’t disproportionately be one person being the support and making the compromises. I live a very happy life with Andrew. We met when he was at Amnesty, and I was at the ICJ. We were part of the global human rights movement together. He is my life partner, my soulmate and my best friend. But also, frankly, reject the societal pressure to marry, to be coupled up. Part of believing in yourself is finding the path that is right for you. You’re unique and your path, necessarily, will not look like everyone else’s. Embrace that.

Finally, I would say enjoy your life and have fun. There is much more in life than your career. Enjoy the company of your family and friends. I mentioned before my late parents and of course the ever-supportive Andrew, but my siblings, brothers and sisters in law, nieces and nephews also play a huge role in my life. I adore them and get comfort in having them around me and feeling that I am part of a whole that cares about me. Andrew and I also love culture. We love cinema, theatre and reading our story books, and we enjoy travel and experiencing other places. We also love having a good discussion and sharing a good laugh with our neighbours and friends. Life is much shorter than one thinks. That is difficult to grasp when one is young, but it’s true, nonetheless.