World Bulletin
Deborah Brown Named First Leo Nevas Human Rights Fellow of UNA-USA
Deborah Brown is the first Leo Nevas Human Rights Fellow of the UNA-USA, a program of the United Nations Foundation (UNF). In this position, she advocates for and supports constructive U.S. engagement with the UN and its human rights mechanisms, in part by helping to educate UNA chapters. She has started working with other civil society groups and non-governmental organizations, UN staff and advocates in New York City, stakeholders on Capitol Hill, and UNA chapters across the country. She also works with the Leo Nevas Human Rights Task Force, a group of leading authorities in the field of human rights, to support their work to encourage greater U.S. engagement with the UN on human rights.
Brown’s focus is to bring more attention to the work of the UN’s human rights bodies and to encourage constructive U.S. engagement with them, including the Human Rights Council, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and various human rights treaty bodies within the UN. Over the course of the year she will travel to Geneva, where the Human Rights Council is based, and to UNA chapters to speak on human rights related issues.
She comes to UNA-USA and UNF with a strong interest in human rights and governance issues in the Middle East, having lived and traveled through much of the region. Previously, she worked as a program reporting officer for the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Lebanon, where she served as an observer in NDI’s international observation mission to Lebanon and as the lead writer for the Institute’s final election assessment report. She then served as an election observer in the 2010 South Sudanese elections and spent the summer in Damascus studying Arabic. Brown worked previously for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems supporting electoral and civil society programs in the Caucasus and Central Asia. She has also held internships at the State Department's Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; the International Organization for Migration, the U.S. House of Representatives; and Amnesty International. She holds a master’s degree in Democracy and Governance and Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in Political Science and Human Rights. She is a recipient of the Arthur Liman Public Interest Law Fellowship from Yale Law School.
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