This presentation will draw from Professor Hall's decades long work on the "war on terror", in particular the US government's global rendition and secret detention program, employed after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US. She will also draw from her two stints as a legal observer at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility housed at the US Naval Base in Cuba and reflect on how the current US administration has engaged again in illegal rendition; arbitrary detention; and torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of persons in its custody. Professor Hall wrote in Salon about her first trip to Guantánamo for Human Rights Watch in 2008: https://www.hrw.org/news/2008/08/18/eight-days-guantanamo and then in Newsweek for her second trip for Amnesty International in 2020: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/02/european-complicity-in-cia-torture-in-black-sites/. She will discuss as well the Trump administration's illegal transfer of Venezuelan men to CECOT (The Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum security prison in El Salvador) and how the government has learned no lessons from the past "rendition years" and the legal black hole of Guantánamo Bay.  

Julia Hall is a US-trained lawyer who served as co-director of research in Amnesty International’s Europe Regional Office in the organization's International Secretariat from 2021-2023. Hall was Amnesty's expert on counter-terrorism and human rights in Europe from 2009-2024 and was senior legal counsel in the Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Program at Human Rights Watch from 1996-2009.

She has conducted research, advocacy, and strategic litigation in over 25 countries and in a range of areas, including: freedom of expression in Europe; racial and gender discrimination; the prohibition against torture; refugee/migrants' rights; administrative and preventive detention; and oversight of intelligence agencies. She has also served as a trial monitor, including as a legal observer at military commissions' proceedings at Guantánamo Bay.

She has authored numerous reports, articles, op-eds and amicus briefs; conducted advocacy at the United Nations, Council of Europe, European Union, OSCE, and at national levels; and served as an expert in individual cases before the European Court of Human Rights, and in UK, Canadian and US federal courts.

Hall was an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo between 1996 and 2003. She is a Fulbright Fellow (American University in Cairo, Egypt) and a Rotary International Fellow (Australian National University). She is a graduate of Fordham University and the SUNY Buffalo School of Law, and was a Ford Fellow at The Hague Academy of International Law and a fellow of the Salzburg Seminar. She is a former member of the International Bar Association's Task Force on Terrorism/Counter-Terrorism. Her current research focuses on freedom of speech and other expression in the context of protest movements.

This event is sponsored by The University of Chicago Law School's International Programs, Global Human Rights Clinic, International Law Society, Human Rights Law Society and The University of Chicago Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.

Lunch will be provided. Please submit dietary requests eight business days prior to the program to Aican Nguyen at aican@uchicago.edu. Although we will try to accommodate dietary needs, it is not guaranteed.