Omar Shakir is the Executive Director of Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN), the organization founded by the late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi that seeks to change US policy in the Middle East and hold human rights abusers in the region accountable. Prior to his current role, Omar served for nearly a decade as the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch.
In that capacity, he spearheaded the organization's documentation of the genocide in Gaza and other atrocities across Israel/Palestine and authored several seminal reports, including a 213-page report documenting how Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians, the most widely covered and viewed report in the organization's history. As a result of his human rights advocacy, the Israeli government deported Omar in November 2019.
Before that, he was a Bertha Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he worked as part of legal teams that represented men detained at Guantanamo Bay, making frequent visits to the detention facility, and that represented Professor Steven Salaita, who was fired from a tenured faculty position over his tweets about Palestine.
As the 2013-14 Arthur R. and Barbara D. Finberg Fellow at Human Rights Watch, he investigated human rights violations in Egypt in the aftermath of a military coup and authored the most authoritative report to date on the Rab'a massacre, one of the largest killings of protesters in a single day in recent history. His commentary has appeared in major media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN and Reuters, and he has spoken before the EU Parliament, the UN Human Rights Council and at dozens of universities, including Harvard, Yale and Duke.
A former Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Omar holds a JD from Stanford Law School, where he co-authored as part of the International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic a report on the civilian consequences of US drone strikes in Pakistan, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Affairs, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford. He speaks Arabic and English.
