Khawaja Naveed to be keynote speaker at Harvard Law School symposium

By Abdul Qadir Qureshi

Renowned lawyer and a former Judge of the High Court of Sindh, Khawaja Naveed Ahmed has been invited by the Harvard Law School, USA, for participation in the Harvard ILJ Symposium which opens on February 20. He has been honored by the Harvard Law School to open the symposium and deliver keynote address. 

The topics of Khawaja's keynote address will be transnational corruption, state-sponsored economic espionage, extra-judicial killings and target killings. He flew out of Karachi for Boston, USA, on February 18. 

The symposium will be spanned over three sessions in which the invited panelists would discuss this year's topic of State Ethics: Controlling The Behavior of Governments and Their Partners.

Khawaja Naveed Ahmed is a practicing lawyer of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and has 37 years standing at Bar. He has held the offices of Advocate General Sindh, Pakistan, and has served as the Judge of the Sindh High Court of Pakistan. Ahmed is a human rights activist and had been Chairman of the Legal Aid and Human Rights Committee of Sindh Bar Council, Pakistan, for five years. 

He also had been elected as the Senior Vice President of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan. Presently, Ahmed is member of the Managing Committee of Red Crescent (Hilal-e-Ahmer). 

Khawja also writes columns as a political analyst and frequently participates in talk shows on popular T.V. Channels. He also hosts a mock trial legal education show on one of the prominent T.V. Channels. The program is very popular amongst communities in Pakistan, United Kingdom, United States of America, and Canada.

Other panelist Christof Heyns holds the degrees MA LLB University of Pretoria; LLM Yale Law School; and PhD University of the Witwatersrand. He is Professor of Human Rights Law and Co-director of the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa at the University of Pretoria. 

Jeffrey Laurenti is senior fellow at The Century Foundation on international affairs. He has served as director for TCF’s international task force on Afghanistan in its regional and multilateral dimensions and as co-director of TCF’s peace and security initiative with the Center for American Progress. 

James Ross is Legal and Policy Director at Human Rights Watch, where he has worked since 2001. He previously worked in the Humanitarian Affairs office of Médecins sans Frontières in the Netherlands, in Bosnia for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, in Cambodia for the International Human Rights Law Group, and in the Philippines for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. 

The Symposium moderator Gabriella Blum will be Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School.