In July and August 2013, tens of thousands of Egyptians participated in large demonstrations to denounce the military’s July 3 ouster of Mohamed Morsy, the country’s first elected civilian president. Human Rights Watch (HRW) conducted a one-year investigation into how Egypt’s military-backed government responded to the protests, concluding that security forces systematically and methodically opened fire on crowds of largely unarmed demonstrators in acts that likely constitute crimes against humanity. In the single largest incident, the August 14 dispersal of the sit-in in Rab’a Square, police killed at least 817 people, making it one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day on par with the Tienanmen Massacre. Over one year later, not a single person has been held accountable.

Omar Shakir (JD ’13) spent much of the year investigating the killings, interviewing scores of witnesses and examining physical evidence and hours of video footage, and was lead author of the 188-page HRW report on the events, the most significant documentation of the killings to date. He will discuss the report’s findings, the state of human rights in Egypt today, and his experience working as a human rights lawyer amidst a serious crackdown and in a climate of rampant impunity.

Omar is currently a Bertha Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he works on litigation involving abuses in the name of national security in the US. He previously was a Fulbright scholar in Syria and is a graduate of Stanford Law School, Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and Stanford University.