About the speaker:

Heba Morayef is Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Regional Director. Prior to that she was Associate Director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights in Cairo as Associate Director where she was responsible for the organization’s advocacy strategy and criminal justice work. She worked with International Crisis Group as their Senior Egypt Analyst 2014-2015 until the authorities shut down the group’s Cairo office. Heba was Human Rights Watch’s Egypt director in Cairo from 2008-2014, where she led the organization’s research and advocacy work on Egypt during the Arab Spring and the subsequent coup. She was also HRW’s Libya researcher from 2008-2011 during which she led two field missions to Libya in 2009. Heba worked at Amnesty International’s International Secretariat from 2006-2008 covering Tunisia and Libya as North Africa Campaigner. Before that she worked for Article 19 in London and at UNDP’s Human Rights Capacity Building Project in Cairo. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science with a specialisation in Public International Law from the American University in Cairo and an LLM in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was named as one of Foreign Policy’s 2013 Global Thinkers, Forbes’ 12 Women to Watch for 2014 and was a Time 100 nominee for 2013. Her op-eds have appeared in Foreign Policy, the Times, the International Herald Tribune.