It’s our great pleasure today to welcome Aminta Ossom as an IntLawGrrls contributor.  Aminta is the 2012-2013 Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. Working with the Crowley Program at the Leitner Center, she designed and led a yearlong human rights project examining disability rights in Rwanda. As a culmination of that project, she and her students coordinated a comparative symposium on global disability rights at Fordham Law School. They will publish a final report in Spring 2014.

 Prior to joining the Leitner Center, Aminta conducted research as a Harvard Satter Fellow and American Society of International Law Arthur C. Helton Fellow with Amnesty International’s Campaign for International Justice. Based in West Africa, she contributed reports to Amnesty International’s No Safe Haven series that outlined national legal frameworks for addressing crimes under international law.  Aminta has also worked with or provided research support to Amnesty International’s Africa Program, the International Rescue Committee’s Legal Assistance Center, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the Khmer Rouge tribunal), and the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. She has also provided research and programmatic support to human rights scholars and practitioners working on international justice and rule of law projects in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Aminta holds an MSc in African Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where she was a Frank Knox Memorial Traveling Fellow and a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar. She also holds a BA from the University of Oklahoma and a JD from Harvard Law School.  Her introductory post today analyzes the U.S. Senate hearings held earlier this monthon domestic ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Heartfelt welcome!