Margaret Satterthwaite, our now former chair of GI-ESCR Board, has been appointed by the Human Rights Council as the new Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers.

All of GI-ESCR Board members, and its Executive Director, Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona, want to thank her immensely for her leadership and important contributions to the work of GI-ESCR. We wish her all the best and very much look forward to continuing working with her in this new capacity.

about Margaret

She is a Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at NYU School of Law, Professor of Clinical Law, and Director of the Global Justice Clinic. She also serves as Faculty Direcor of the Root-Tilden-Kern program. Her recent scholarship includes Indicators in Crisis: Rights-Based Humanitarianism in Post-Earthquake Haiti, published in the N.Y.U. Journal of International Law & Politics in 2011; The Trust in Indicators: Measuring Human Rights (co-authored with AnnJanette Rosga), published in the Berkeley Journal of International Law in 2009, and Human Rights Advocacy Stories (co-edited with Deena Hurwitz and Douglas Ford, 2009), a volume in the Law Stories series. Her current work focuses on empirical methods in human rights settings, especially the creation and deployment of metrics and indicators; on economic and social rights; and on human rights in counter-terrorism.

Satterthwaite joined the NYU faculty in 2006 after many years in the human rights field. Her human rights career began before law school: between 1990 and 1996, she co-founded and then directed Amnesty International USA’s program on the human rights of those persecuted on the basis of their sexual orientation. Satterthwaite also completed a Master’s Degree and served as International Programs Coordinator for the human rights education organisation Street Law, where she helped develop curriculum in human rights and legal literacy, as well as conducting workshops and training sessions for human rights advocates and legal professionals. In 1995, she was employed as a human rights investigator by the Haitian National Truth and Justice Commission.

After receiving her law degree from NYU in 1999, Satterthwaite clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The following year she was the Furman Fellow at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, where she focused on emergency law and collusion in Northern Ireland. In 2002, Satterthwaite clerked at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Between 2002 and 2003, Satterthwaite was a human rights consultant for the United Nations, working with the human rights section of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). In 2003, she was hired as Research Director of NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. She joined the full-time faculty in January 2006.

Beginning in 2011, she has served as a consultant to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation. From 2006-2011, she served as a member of the Advisory Panel of Experts to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights While Countering Terrorism. In 2009, she received the Pioneer of Justice and Equality for Women and the Law, and in 2011 she was awarded the Podell Distinguished Teaching Award.