News and Events

×

Bard College Announces Two Recipients of the Second Annual Anthony Lester Fellowships to Support Practical Work in the Field of Human Rights and the Rule of Law

The Human Rights Project at Bard College has announced this year’s recipients of the Anthony Lester Fellowships, which support practical work in human rights and the rule of law. Fellowships have been awarded to Hadeal Abdelatti and James Rooney. Abdelatti (a Cambridge law finalist and aspiring barrister) will use the fellowship to investigate concerns around the handling of deceased inmates’ organs in the state of Alabama. James Rooney (a barrister-at-law specializing in public interest and human rights law from Ireland) will use the fellowship to provide legal advice and assistance to the Streha Centre, an LGBTI+ shelter and community service in Albania, for three months in summer 2025. Each fellow will receive a stipend of $25,000.

The fellowship committee selected Abdelatti and Rooney from a large number of applications because their projects exemplified Anthony Lester’s commitment to the practical use of the rule of law and human rights as a tool to do good in the world.

Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project at Bard, said: “From Alabama to Albania, these two creative young advocates will pursue projects of critical, and painfully symptomatic, urgency. Hadeal Abdelatti and James Rooney are showing us that the front lines of human rights work today are dynamic and complex. In the spirit of Anthony Lester, they know what's worth fighting for.”

Hadeal Abdelatti is an experienced researcher and final-year law student at the University of Cambridge. Abdelatti spent two years working as a student researcher for a university-wide project investigating the systemic legacies of colonialism in Cambridge’s teaching and learning. In 2024, Abdelatti won a SEDA Award in recognition of her work on this project.
 
In the summer of 2024, Abdelatti undertook an internship with The Woods Foundation in Alabama. During this time, she learned how gaps in state legislation are leaving room for unethical practices, particularly around the retention and appropriation of deceased prisoners’ organs without clear consent or adequate communication with their families.
 
Abdelatti’s project for the Lester Fellowship aims to address concerns around the handling of deceased prisoners’ organs. Through a combination of mapping, legal research, litigation, and community engagement, Abdelatti aims to pinpoint gaps in oversight, inform legal and policy reform, and raise awareness to help strengthen community responses to potential rights violations.

James Rooney is a barrister-at-law in Ireland. His practice specializes in public interest and human rights law, regularly representing asylum seekers, people experiencing housing precarity, and parents whose children have been taken into care by the state. He cofounded a weekly clinic at the Free Legal Advice Centres in Dublin, focused on addressing the unmet legal needs of the LGBTI+ community in Ireland. The work he proposes to do with the Lester Fellowship derives from his passion for practical human rights work and a motivation to put his extensive legal education to good use in the service of others and will focus on the Streha Centre in Tirana, Albania.

Rooney’s Lester Fellowship project will provide legal advice and assistance for three months in summer 2025 to the Streha Centre, an LGBTI+ shelter and community service in Albania. Established in 2014, Streha is the first LGBTI+ residential shelter in Southeast Europe. Streha provides emergency accommodation, legal advice, and social supports for LGBTI+ clients experiencing discrimination and social exclusion in Albania and throughout the wider region. Streha fields daily requests for urgent legal advice from LGBTI+ people, including on how to seek international protection in the European Union due to persecution, including death threats, torture, and discrimination, on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Rooney will use his expertise as an immigration lawyer and LGBTI+ rights advocate in a country receiving international protection applications from Albanian nationals, to provide assistance in advance of their seeking asylum. Rooney’s project is a timely and worthwhile focus as the possible withdrawal of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funding in the coming year could jeopardise one of the few sanctuaries for vulnerable and marginalized sexual minorities in Southeast Europe.

Anthony Lester Fellowships
The fellowships honor the memory and legacy of Anthony Lester QC (Lord Lester of Herne Hill), one of Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyers. As a young lawyer, Lester visited the American South twice during the civil rights movement and wrote a report on race relations. His experiences there inspired his pioneering work as a barrister and legislator. He wrote in his memoir Talking to Myself that, while on a fellowship in the United States, he realized “the practice of law could be used to promote political and social change . . . Reinforced by my involvement with American constitutional law and civil rights in the Deep South, I decided to give it a try. It was life-changing.”

The fellowships are administered by the Human Rights Project at Bard College, and supported by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, and the Lester family.  Maya Lester KC, Anthony Lester’s daughter and a British barrister, said: “We are delighted to be able to offer these fellowships in memory of our father who was inspired by his early international experience and an enthusiastic mentor to lawyers early in their careers wanting to do something useful for the world.” Gideon Lester, Anthony Lester’s son and Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Fisher Center at Bard, added: “We are grateful to the Gatsby and Open Society Foundations for their leadership support, which ensures that these fellowships exist in perpetuity, and to Bard College’s Human Rights Project for administering them.”

Post Date: 06-24-2025