We are thrilled to announce today that the Human Rights Program has hired Yee Htun and Salma Waheedi as clinical instructors in our International Human Rights Clinic.
For the past year, Yee and Salma have worked with us as clinical advocacy fellows, supervising projects on everything from land rights and telecommunications policies in Myanmar to torture in Iraq. They also share a strong focus on gender justice.
For Yee, that focus comes from a personal place. She’s spent most of her career as an attorney working on women’s rights, often with refugee and migrant communities. Yee herself was born in Myanmar and immigrated to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee.
“Women’s rights for me is not an abstract concept but a cause to which I have dedicated most of my life’s work to,” said Yee. “Whether it is coordinating and launching the first ever global campaign with Nobel Peace Laureates to stop sexual violence in conflict or offering legal counsel to women’s organizations seeking to enact a prevention of violence against women law, I have done it out of the belief that only when we give power to women and girls do we advance the human rights for all.”
Until recently, Yee was the Myanmar Program Director for Justice Trust, a Yangon-based international legal non-profit organization that provides support to communities. This year, she worked with clinical students to elevate the voices of women human rights advocates in the country; convene workshops on law reform in Myanmar with LGBTQI activists, human rights defenders, journalists, and lawyers; document land policy that discriminates against women; and examine the country’s new telecommunications law, which has had a chilling effect on free speech.
Salma came to the Clinic this year as a joint fellow with the Islamic Legal Studies Program: Law and Social Change, where she focused on women’s rights in Islamic legal systems and issues of legal reform and gender justice in Muslim family laws. This past year, she and her students worked with women’s rights lawyers and advocates across different Muslim countries, documenting legal obstacles to women’s equality, advocating for an end to discriminatory policies and practices, and engaging with the committee of the Convention on All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to foster deeper and more productive dialogues with the states.
In the Clinic, Salma also plans to focus on business and human rights concerns in the Middle East, particularly with respect to issues of corporate accountability and economic justice. Before entering the legal profession, Salma worked in her native country of Bahrain as Economic Planning and Development Director at Bahrain’s Economic Development Board, and later served as a consultant on economic policy and international development around the world.
As a lawyer, she continued to advocate for social and economic justice through community development and legal assistance programs in the United States and abroad.