Leila Nadya Sadat

Leila Nadya Sadat

Leila Nadya Sadat (born 1960 in Newark, New Jersey) is the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law and the Director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute. She is also the director and co-founder of the Summer Institute for International Law and Policy at Utrecht University. Sadat is the Director of The Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, a multi-year project to study the problem of crimes against humanity and draft a comprehensive convention addressing their punishment and prevention. She has spearheaded the international effort to establish this new global convention. Sadat was recently elected to membership in the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. On December 12, 2012, Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda of the International Criminal Court appointed Sadat as her Special Adviser on Crimes Against Humanity.

Sadat received her B.A. from Douglass College, her J.D. from Tulane Law School (summa cum laude) and holds graduate degrees from Columbia University School of Law (LLM, summa cum laude) and the University of Paris I – Sorbonne (diplôme d’études approfondies). She is bilingual in French and English.

As a scholar, teacher, and author, Sadat has contributed to the establishment and study of the International Criminal Court (ICC). She was a delegate to the U.N. Preparatory Committee and to the 1998 Diplomatic Conference in Rome which established the ICC, represented the government of Timor-Leste at the 8th Session of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC, and served as a delegate for the International Law Association, American Branch at the 2010 ICC Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda.

Sadat is known for her work in Public International Law and human rights. More recently, she has been invited to write on topics ranging from the U.S. use of drones, the legal categorization of the conflict in Syria, the U.S. war on terror and its classification of others as "unlawful enemy combatants"

From 2001-2003 she served as a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. She was nominated by then Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt and appointed by Congress. The 9-member Commission was established by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to advise the President and the Department of State on Issues of International Religious Freedom, both generally and with regard to particular countries.

...
Wikipedia