Sarah Leah Whitson is an American lawyer and the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). She previously served as director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch.
Early life and education
Whitson was reared by an Armenian American mother, Ashi Whitson, who was born in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City and immigrated to the United States in 1960. Her father was from Texas. Whitson was a student at Rose and Alex Pilibos Armenian School for 12 years in Los Angeles and spent childhood summers with family in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
In 1988, Whitson graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley, located in Berkeley, California, taking time to study abroad in Egypt. In 1991, she graduated with a Juris Doctor degree from the Harvard Law School, where she was a classmate of Barack Obama's.
Whitson has written articles for such publications as Foreign Policy and Huffington Post.
Career
Early career
After completing law school, Whitson worked for Goldman Sachs, the investment banking firm, and the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton.
At the same time, according to the New Republic, she "pursued activism on the side, volunteering for, among other groups, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (where she was co-organizer of a delegation in 2002 that lobbied Kofi Annan to press ahead with a United Nations investigation of Israel's Jenin operation) and MADRE (a women's rights group, with which she traveled to Lebanon on a solidarity mission in 1996 after an Israeli bombing campaign)." She served two terms on the board of directors of the New York chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, in 2001 and 2002.
Prior to working for HRW, she also served as general counsel to the Center for Economic and Social Rights, and traveled on human-rights missions to Iraq for that organization. In addition, she was a volunteer member of the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights and the Armenian Bar Association, of which she remains a member. Moreover, Whitson was engaged in human-rights work for the Harvard Study Team and International Study Team missions examining the impact of war and sanctions on the Iraqi civilian population. She also participated in the International Human Rights Law Group's election-monitoring mission in Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq.
Human Rights Watch
Whitson served as the director of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division of Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 2004 to 2020, going on to become Executive Director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). She has published articles on the Middle East in international and regional publications and has led dozens of advocacy missions throughout the region and has overseen numerous research missions and reports on human rights conditions there.
Whitson's criticisms of Middle Eastern/North African governments
Egypt
Since the military overthrow of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's security forces have launched a campaign of persecution against the Muslim Brotherhood, "with mass killings of protesters, dragnet arrests of its supporters and attempts to ban the Brotherhood," Whitson wrote in The New York Times. She also noted that Egypt's military-backed government killed more than 1,000 protesters in 2013 – without being held to account. She criticized an Egyptian court for sentencing 529 Muslim Brotherhood members to death in a mass trial, even though only 70 of the accused appeared in court. A Huffington Post reporter quoted her as accusing Egypt's military government of trampling on Egyptian's basic freedoms.
Libya
Libya is "teetering on the brink of failure," said Whitson to MSNBC in 2014, as the country has been "unable to disarm dozens of armed groups" that terrorize, kidnap, and commit murder. Shortly after the Arab Spring, Whitson, criticized Libya's transitional government for "mimicking Qaddafi laws criminalizing political dissent and granting blanket immunity to any crimes committed in "support" of the revolution" in a Foreign Policy op-ed. In 2009, she called on Gaddafi, the then-dictator, to wipe out repressive laws and free political prisoners.