Susan Benesch

Susan Benesch "is a Clinical Teaching Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, supervising students representing asylum seekers and teaching human rights law. Before her Georgetown fellowship, she directed the Refugee Program at Amnesty International USA in Washington, D.C., where she worked on asylum and refugee issues, focusing especially on child asylum-seekers, and on the U.S. government’s discriminatory treatment of Haitians. As a Bernstein Fellow, Susan worked at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First), where she built a network of grassroots activists around asylum issues, and went on to advise the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on building a similar network for genocide prevention.

"Susan graduated in 2001 from the Law School, where she founded the Cuba Exchange Project, sending Yale students to Havana to debate Cuban law students on topics including human rights. Also during law school, Susan worked at the ICTY, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Mandela Institute for Prisoners in Ramallah, the West Bank. As a member of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, she worked for Human Rights Watch on the Pinochet case and led a team of students working on a suit against two Salvadoran generals living in Florida, seeking to hold them liable for massacres in El Salvador.

"For six years, before law school, Susan was a full-time newspaper correspondent in Latin America and wrote for magazines such as the New Republic and the Columbia Journalism Review. She covered a dozen countries, focusing especially on Haiti and Cuba. After leaving Haiti in 1994, Susan co-authored a book, The Hand of the Poet (Rizzoli 1997)."