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Bard College Announces Recipients of Third Annual Anthony Lester Fellowships in 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 Charlotte Manson and Darlington Marange. Manson (London, UK; international human rights law and gender justice expert, and PhD candidate in law) will use the fellowship to provide coordination and legal advocacy support to Syrian women’s rights organizations, feminist leaders, and lawyers. Marange (Harare, ZW; business and human rights lawyer, and LLM master of laws) will conduct fieldwork in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province to assess grievance mechanisms available to communities adversely impacted by mining activities. Each fellow will receive a stipend of $25,000.

The fellowship committee selected Manson and Marange 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 for justice.

Of the awardees, Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project, said: “Anthony Lester began his storied legal career in the early 1960s with two journeys to the Jim Crow South, ‘to discover,’ as he later put it, ‘who were prisoners of conscience there.’ Charlotte Manson and Darlington Marange will undertake their own journeys this year in much the same spirit: seeing for themselves, talking with people, gathering information, and taking action. They bring formidable legal skills and a passion for justice to this work, and we are honored to support them.”   

For over a decade, Charlotte Manson has negotiated and advised across UN and EU forums and worked to advance human rights, gender equality, and gender justice across diverse contexts. In 2024, she undertook an academic transition to law, completing her graduate diploma in law at City St. George's, University of London, where she is currently pursuing her fully funded PhD. She transitions to the legal profession with broad expertise in diverse peacebuilding and conflict-affected settings, political and multilateral environments, having served most recently as senior human rights and gender advisor at the United Kingdom's Mission to the United Nations.

Throughout her work, Manson has observed how women and girls are consistently underrepresented in peacebuilding and transitional justice processes while gender-based discrimination remains in law, policy, and practice. For her Lester Fellowship project, her work will focus on the structural barriers to gender-responsive transitional justice in post-Assad Syria. She will provide coordination and legal advocacy support to Syrian feminist lawyers, leaders and gender justice advocates while embedded with the international NGO, the Gender Justice Practitioner Hub. Her fieldwork will buttress the coordination and broader representation of women’s movements within Syria, while providing oral and written advocacy training for these leaders to engage in regional and international forums.

Motivating Darlington Marange’s project is the struggle of local Zambian communities bearing the cost of global demand for critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and copper. Marange has a strong track record of advancing human rights and corporate accountability in the extractive sector. For his contributions, he was recognized as the Law Society of Zimbabwe’s Young Human Rights Lawyer of the Year in 2022 and received the Human Rights Tulip Award from the Netherlands Embassy in Harare in 2023.

Building on these experiences, the Lester Fellowship will enable Marange to apply his novel corporate accountability approach in neighboring Zambia. During the three-month fellowship, he will examine grievance handling and remedy mechanisms in the Copperbelt Province, with a focus on identifying gaps and opportunities for stronger corporate accountability. His work will culminate in practical recommendations for mining companies to strengthen their grievance and remedy processes and better address the concerns of affected communities.

Gideon Lester, artistic director and chief executive of the Fisher Center at Bard, and one of Anthony Lester’s children, added: “On behalf of the Lester family I’d like to congratulate Charlotte and Darlington on their exceptional and inspiring work, and wish them well as they embark on their fieldwork. Anthony Lester would be so proud of them.”

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 (2022) 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 the 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: 09-03-2026