Azadeh N. Shahshahani

Azadeh Shahshahani, Legal and Advocacy Director with Project South, advances a practice of movement lawyering, focused on confronting state repression and dismantling systems of surveillance, incarceration, and deportation. Shahshahani has organized for two decades to protect and defend migrants and Black and Muslim communities from systemic lslamophobia, xenophobia, and anti-Black racism. She also provides support to social justice movements in the Global South, from Brazil to Palestine.

Shahshahani is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She currently serves on the Advisory Council of the American Association of Jurists.

She is the author or editor of several groundbreaking human rights reports as well as law review articles and book chapters focused on movement lawyering, immigrants’ rights, surveillance of Muslim-Americans, and using the international human rights framework as a tool for liberation. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, MSNBC, Time Magazine, Boston Review, Slate, and Los Angeles Times, among others.

Shahshahani received her JD from the University of Michigan Law School where she was Article Editor for The Michigan Journal of International Law. She also has a Master’s in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan.

She is the recipient of the Shanara M. Gilbert Human Rights Award from the Society of American Law Teachers, the US Human Rights Network Human Rights Movement Builder Award, the Emory Law School Outstanding Leadership in the Public Interest Award, the University of Georgia Law School Equal Justice Foundation Public Interest Practitioner Award, and the Emory University MLK Jr. Community Service Award, among several other recognitions. She has also been recognized as an Abolitionist by the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University & the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives.