Chester Atkins is the Founder of ADS Ventures, Inc. and served on the CJA board from 1998 through 2010. Chet was Board Chair from 2008-2010. Chet served as a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts 5th District (1985-93), Massachusetts Democratic State Chair, and a member of the Massachusetts State Senate and House of Representatives. Since leaving the U.S. Congress, Chet has led a number of initiatives to utilize private capital to achieve public purposes and has organized successful public funding initiatives for organizations in the education, healthcare, high tech and real estate development industries. He also served as an election observer and legislative trainer for newly elected governments in Cambodia, Yemen, Albania, Russia, Republic of Georgia and Peru. He advocates for numerous humanitarian causes on the boards of such groups as Amnesty International and Oxfam.
Carlos Castresana Fernandez is a Project Coordinator of the UN Office on Drugs & Crime, Mexican Regional Office. He is also Visiting Professor and Director of International Human Rights Programs at the USF Center for Law and Global Justice. In 2005, he was appointed Prosecutor of the Spanish Supreme Court. Professor Castresana authored the formal complaint and subsequent reports in the Argentine case and the Pinochet case before the Spanish Audiencia Nacional. Professor Castresana serves as an expert in international legal cooperation and other issues in Europe and Latin America. He received the National Human Rights Award in Spain in 1997, was awarded a Doctorate Honoris causa from the Guadalajara University, Mexico in 2003. He received his law degree from the Complutense University, Madrid, Spain.
Sandra Coliver is the Senior Legal Officer of Freedom of Information & Expression for the Open Society Justice Initiative. Ms. Coliver has worked in the Human Rights field since 1979 and was the Executive Director of CJA from 2001-05. In addition she was one of the founding members of Amnesty International USA’s Legal Support Network and a member of Amnesty International USA’s Board of Directors from 1992-96. In 1996, she moved to Sarajevo where she worked for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the International Crisis Group. She has taught human rights, humanitarian law, international law and women’s rights and has written and lectured extensively on these issues.
Benjamin Cuellar is Executive Director of the Human Rights Institute of the Central American University, San Salvador, El Salvador (UCA). The UCA was instrumental in leading the movement to stop the civil war and promote human rights in El Salvador. The Human Rights Institute of UCA litigates human rights cases before the national criminal and civil courts and in the Inter-American system. Mr. Cuellar and his staff attorneys have provided invaluable assistance to CJA on our Salvadoran cases.
Gerald Gray, a psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker, founded CJA in 1998. His experience with torture survivors in private practice motivated him to found Survivors International in 1991, which was one of the first torture treatment centers in the country. While working at Survivors, he discovered the pervasive problem of torturers living in the U.S. This injustice spurred him to create CJA to provide legal redress to survivors of human rights violations. In 2001 he left CJA to direct a new torture treatment program in San Jose, the Center for Survivors of Torture, affiliated with Asian Americans for Community Involvement. In 2005 he became an Ashoka fellow and co-director of the Institute for Redress & Recovery at Santa Clara University.
Jennifer M. Green is Law Professor at the University of Minnesota. Prior to that Ms. Green was Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, where she specializes in international human rights law and litigation in U.S. courts. She is a former director of Harvard Law School’s Clinical Human Rights Program. She worked on human rights claims in the international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the UN Commission on Human Rights, and the Inter-American human rights system.
Paul Hoffman is a partner with Schonbrun, DeSimone, Seplow, Harris & Hoffman, LLP and has been a leading civil rights and human rights attorney since 1976. Paul has been lead or co-counsel on numerous Alien Tort Statute cases, including the landmark cases against Unocal and Philippine ex-President Marcos. He chairs the International Executive Committee of Amnesty International and the ACLU’s International Human Rights Committee and is a member of the California Committee of Human Rights Watch. He serves as an Adjunct Professor on the law faculties of Stanford, UCLA, USC, Loyola, Southwestern University, and the Oxford University/George Washington Program in International Human Rights Law.
Naomi Roht-Arriaza is a Professor at the University of California, Hastings College of Law where she teaches international human rights and international law among other courses including corporate responsibility, trade and social issues. She has written and lectured extensively on industry self-regulation in the environmental and labor rights areas. Her publications include Impunity and International Human Rights Law and Practice (Oxford University Press, 1995) and The Pinochet Effect (U. of Penn. Press 2005). She is a participant on several working groups of the American Society of International Law.
Steven M. Schneebaum is a shareholder with the law firm of Greenberg Traurig LLP. His practice concentrates on dispute resolution, including litigation, negotiation, and arbitration, international law and trade, and the law of the European Union. Steven has been involved in many of the significant cases under the Alien Tort Statute including the landmark case, Filartiga v. Pena, and CJA’s case against an Indonesian General who gave orders to carry out atrocities in East Timor (Doe v. Lumintang). Mr. Schneebaum has taught international law and human rights courses at numerous law schools and is now Professsorial Lecturer at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written and lectured widely in international human rights law topics since 1979.
Ralph G. Steinhardt, CJA’s founding Chair, is the Arthur Selwyn Miller Research Professor of Law and International Affairs at George Washington University; and co-director of the Oxford-GW Program in International Human Rights Law at New College, Oxford. He has written books and articles on the application of international law in U.S. courts, statutory construction, international trade law, jurisprudence, and human rights. He has served as legal counsel to several foreign governments, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Human Rights Law Group, as well as represented plaintiffs in numerous lawsuits alleging violations of international human rights law.
Beth Van Schaack is the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School (2014-15), and a Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. She was formerly the Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice of the U.S. Department of State. She has been a member of the U.S. Department of State’s Advisory Council on International Law and served on the United States interagency delegation to the International Criminal Court Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda. Van Schaack was formerly an associate at Morrison & Foerster LLP. She has also served as Acting Executive Director of The Center for Justice & Accountability, and as a law clerk with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Van Schaack is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School.
