The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law

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Hannah Garry

Executive Director, Professor from Practice

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Prior to becoming the Promise Institute’s Executive Director, Hannah R. Garry was Clinical Professor of Law and founding director of USC Gould’s International Human Rights Clinic, established in 2011. Her areas of teaching and scholarship include international criminal law, transitional justice, international courts and tribunals, international human rights, and international refugee law.

She has been invited as an expert before the International Criminal Court, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Canadian Parliament and various task forces. She is regularly quoted as an expert and has published OpEds with the following media outlets: the New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, BBC, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times and The Hill.

In 2022, Garry was USC Gould’s first Fulbright research scholar at the University of Oslo Law Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order (PluriCourts). In 2015, she was awarded the prestigious USC Mellon Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students in recognition of her excellence in teaching.

Garry is a member of the Faculty Advisory Council for the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the Southern California International Law Scholars group. She is an active member of the American Society of International Law, an expert on the inaugural Clooney Foundation for Justice TrialWatch Initiative’s Experts Panel and a member of Human Rights Watch’s Justice Circle.

As for other experience, Garry has filed a brief on behalf of amici torture survivors before the United States Supreme Court in United States of America v. Husayn, et al. and given oral arguments as amicus curiae with former United Nations special rapporteurs in the Afghanistan investigation appeals hearing at the International Criminal Court. She has also previously served as a senior legal adviser to the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and as a visiting professional in the Presidency of the International Criminal Court.

Prior to joining USC Gould, Garry was visiting assistant professor of law at the University of Colorado School of Law where she taught public international law, international criminal law and international human rights law. She also supervised students on Guantanamo detainee representation before U.S. military commissions as well as Alien Tort Statute litigation in federal court. While at CU Law, she was a Presidential Fellow at the American Society of International Law.

Garry has been a research consultant for two years with Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre and Makerere University’s Institute for Social Research implementing a multi-year socio-legal research project on protection of refugee rights under international law East Africa. She has also been a visiting law lecturer at Peking University Law School in Beijing; and a visiting scholar at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, where she published a study with the first compilation of statistics and analysis on the court’s use of interim measures to stay deportation of refugees from Europe. Garry has also been a lecturer on refugee law at the International Institute of Humanitarian Law in San Remo, Italy.

Before academia, Garry was Deputy Chef de Cabinet and legal officer for President Judge Fausto Pocar in the President’s Office & Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in The Hague & Arusha, Tanzania, from 2004-07. Garry also clerked for Judge Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit, and worked as an associate at Freshfields, Bruckhaus, Deringer LLP, in the international arbitration, dispute resolution and public international law groups where she assisted the Eritrea Ethiopia Claims Commission in compensating war crimes claims from prisoners of war and civilians. She is admitted to the New York Bar and United States Supreme Court Bar.

Garry obtained her JD from Berkeley Law, a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University, and a graduate certificate in forced migration studies with distinction as a Visiting Study Fellow at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre.