Amrit Singh (lawyer)

Amrit Singh (born 1969) is a human rights lawyer for the National Security and Counterterrorism program at the Open Society Justice Initiative.^[1] She was formerly a staff attorney at the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project.^[2]

As Senior Legal Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative,^[1] since 2009, Ms. Singh directs a program that conducts strategic litigation and advocacy on national security-related human rights abuses across the globe. She is Counsel, among other cases, in al Nashiri v. Poland and al Nashiri v. Romania, lawsuits brought on behalf of Guantanamo prisoner Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri before the European Court of Human Rights that challenge the role of Poland and Romania in the CIA’s secret detention program.^[3]

Singh is the author of Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition.^[4] The 216-page report, released by OSJI in February 2013, is the most comprehensive account to date of the human rights abuses associated with the CIA’s post 9/11 secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations as well as of the large number of foreign governments implicated in these operations.^[5] The report received global media attention and was the subject of editorials in leading newspapers.^[6]

As Staff Attorney at the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, from 2002-2009, Singh litigated numerous cases relating to immigrants’ rights and post 9/11-related abuses, including ACLU v. Department of Defense, a landmark lawsuit which yielded public disclosure of the “torture memos,”^[7] among thousands of other government records^[8] exposing the systemic nature of the Bush administration’s torture practices.^[9] Ms. Singh was also Counsel in Khouzam v. Chertoff a successful challenge to the U.S. government’s use of anti-torture diplomatic assurances to transfer non-citizens without due process to countries known to employ torture; Ali v. Rumsfeld, a lawsuit against high-ranking officials on behalf of Iraqi and Afghan plaintiffs tortured in U.S. custody abroad, as well as a number of other cases challenging the prolonged detention of non-citizens in U.S. immigration custody.

Ms. Singh has testified before Congress on the subject of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” ^[10][11] She is co-author, with Jameel Jaffer, of Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. (Columbia University Press, 2007).^[12] Prior to joining the ACLU, Singh served as a judicial law clerk to Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum of the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York. She is a graduate of the Yale Law School, Oxford University, and Cambridge University, U.K.

Author

• Singh, Amrit Globalising Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition, Open Society Foundations,(February 2013), New York, NY, ISBN 978-1-936133-75-8^[13]
• Co-Author (with Jameel Jaffer), Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)^[14]
• A report titled: Death by Drone: Civilian Harm Caused by U.S. Targeted Killings in Yemen.^[15][16]

Personal life

Her father is the 14th Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh. She is the youngest of three sisters. She is married to Barton Beebe, a professor of law at New York University.^[17]

Awards

Singh received the India Abroad Publisher's Special Award for Excellence 2012, at an event organised by India Abroad on June 21, 2013, to honour Indian-American achievers in a wide range of professions.,^[18][19]

Singh was honored for her human rights work with the Pursuit of Equal Justice Award, by the New York State Association of Criminal Defense lawyers, in 2011.^[20]

References