University of Cambridge & Harvard Law School

Salman Akram Raja is an Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and has around 30 years of vast experience in all forms of dispute resolution. He is particularly recognized for his successful advocacy before the High Courts and the Supreme Court of Pakistan in a number of far-reaching and landmark constitutional, commercial, and corporate cases.

Smith College & University of Oxford

Sarah Belal is Executive Director of Justice Project Pakistan, a non-profit organization based in Lahore which represents the most vulnerable Pakistani prisoners facing the harshest punishments, at home and abroad. Sarah received her law degree from Oxford University in 2006, was called to the Bar in 2007 and gained rights of audience in the Pakistani High Court in 2008. In December 2016, JPP was awarded the National Human Rights Award, presented by the President of Pakistan.

University of Oxford

Iftikharuddin Riaz has been ranked individually by Chambers and Partners in Band 1 for Commercial Dispute Resolution in Pakistan from 2014 to 2022 and is one of the few lawyers in Pakistan to have been ranked for both dispute resolution and corporate work. Iftikhar has acted in investor-state treaty disputes and was appointed to the high-level committee set up to negotiate Bilateral Investment Treaties on behalf of Pakistan and advised the Government on related issues. Iftikhar has represented Pakistan and the Pakistan Business Council in meetings of Working Group II of the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL).

Cornell University & Yale University

Maryam Khan is a socio-legal scholar on South Asia, and a resident Research Fellow at IDEAS since 2014. She has an SJD (Doctor of Juridical Science) from University of Wisconsin Law School (2024), an LLM from Yale Law School (2009), a Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and Bar-at-Law from Lincoln’s Inn (2002-2003), and a B.A. in Government from Cornell University (2000). She is the first Pakistani to be awarded the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Yale South Asia Fellowship (2010).

As an academic and policy researcher at IDEAS, Maryam uses qualitative methods to study federalism and ethnic conflict, judicialization, legal mobilization, social movements, women’s struggles, comparative constitutionalism, and post-colonial constitutional history through an interdisciplinary lens. Presently, she is the country lead for Pakistan for a 5-year ESRC-funded project in collaboration with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex for ‘Sustaining Power for Women’s Rights in South Asia’ (SuPWR). The SuPWR project has enabled her to deepen her earlier work on child marriages in Pakistan through a rigorous long-range multi-method qualitative study on the impact of civil society advocacy strategy on reform in this area.

University of Cambridge

Ammar Ali Jan is an activist, historian, and educator. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Cambridge, where he worked on communist thought in India. His work explores the intersection of communism and nationalism in Colonial India by examining how European ideas are extended and reshaped as they circulate in the non-European world. He is also a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (HKM), a civil rights campaign dedicated to safeguarding the constitutional rights of Pakistani citizens.

University of Oxford

Dr. Osama Siddique is a Pakistani novelist, legal scholar, teacher and policy reform consultant. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and holds Masters and Doctoral degrees from Harvard Law School. He has also taught at Harvard Law as the Inaugural Henry J. Steiner Visiting Professor in Human Rights. Osama is also a graduate of Government College University and LUMS and has taught at the latter for many years where he also led the establishment of and headed its Law and Policy School.

Osama works in the areas of sociology of law, legal history, human rights, constitutional law, access to justice, and law and development. He also serves on the Senior Faculty of Institute for Global Law & Policy (IGLP) at Harvard. He is also deeply interested in the areas of archeology, ancient and medieval history, literary fiction, science fiction, the natural world, mythology and fantasy.

University of Oxford

Dr. Fahad Rehman is an academic with 10+ years of experience in anthropology and psychology. My research focuses on marginalised communities and intersectionality, specifically how British Muslims use their religious traditions to empower themselves in contexts where gender and ethnicity marginalises them.