Pictured at this 2006 news conference is Isaac Romano (left) and U.S. progressive Senator, George McGovern (Right).

In July of 2006 OWHR Institute-Quebec director, Isaac Romano directs the 2006 OWHR major war resister event in Western Canada, with keynote presenter U.S. Democratic Presidential Candidate and hope for the peace movement in 1972 (during the U.S. War in Vietnam), Senator George McGovern.  This OWHR News Conference was covered by the international media.  This five-day conference had nearly 3,000 attendees going to workshops, hearing major keynote speakers and together celebrating war resistance and war resisters, including two moving evening concert musical performances with 1,100 joyous participants in attendance. (Pictured in our website Header, at the top of each webpage is portions of a newspaper front page article about our 2006 event and major speaker and Keynoter, Senator George McGovern and a peace activist and Rabbi that embodies peace, 2006 OWHR Conference Plenary presenter and among the most powerful, transformative speakers at our event, Network of Spiritual Progressives co-founder, San Francisco Bay Area Rabbi Michael Lerner.).

Jonathan Hafetz:  Advisory Specialist to the OWHR Institute Quebec’s “Monitor and Policy” Working Group and the OWHR Institute Quebec’s Amnesty Working Group.

Click on photo to hear Jonathan Hafetz, guest speaker at Duke University School of Law: "Understanding Boumediene"

Jonathan Hafetz is an expert on human rights, constitutional law, national security, and international justice issues.  He joined Seton Hall Law School in 2010.  Professor Hafetz is the author of Habeas Corpus after 9/11: Confronting America’s New Global Detention System (NYU Press 2011), which received the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts, Honorable Mention, and the American Society of Legal Writers, Scribes Silver Medal Award.  He is the editor of Obama’s Guantanamo: Stories from an Enduring Prison(NYU Press 2016) and the co-editor (with Mark Denbeaux) of The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law (NYU Press 2009). Professor Hafetz’s scholarship has appeared in many publications, including the Yale Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, Columbia Law Review Sidebar, Wisconsin Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, International Journal of Human Rights, and Cambridge Journal of Comparative & International Law, and has been cited by numerous courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.  He is currently working on a book about international criminal justice, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

 Jonathan Hafetz is also an internationally recognized constitutional and human rights lawyer.  Prior to joining Seton Hall, he was a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, a litigation director at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, and a John J. Gibbons Fellow in Public Interest and Constitutional Law at Gibbons, P.C.  He has litigated numerous cases at all level of the federal courts, including Al-Marri v. Spagone, 555 U.S. 1220 (2009), Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008), Munaf v. Geren, 553 U.S. 674 (2008), Rasul v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 466 (2004), Meshal v. Higgenbotham, 804 F.3d 417 (D.C. Cir. 2015), Salahi v. Obama, 625 F.3d 740 (D.C. Cir. 2010), and Jawad v. Obama (D.D.C. 2009).  Professor Hafetz has authored or co-authored more than thirty amicus curiae briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals.

Matt Adams, Advisory Specialist to the OWHR Institute-Quebec’s major immigrant rights projects, including the monumental bronze The Welcoming Immigrant Rights Sculpture project with the City of Laredo, Texas. 

Matt Adams is the legal director for Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, where he has worked since 1998 representing immigrants from all over the world. He has an extensive practice in federal courts with now up to 15 published victory decisions granting relief to his clients in the United States Courts of Appeals.  In addition, he has served as class counsel in several successful class action challenges before federal district courts, including Franco-Gonzalez, et al. v. Holder, et al., where the district court granted class certification on behalf of detained individuals with mental impairments, and issued a permanent injunction, ordering the United States to create the the very first appointed counsel system in the immigration courts.  Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, 2013 WL 3674492 (C.D.Cal. 2013). He was also class counsel in A.B.T. v. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services,  2013 WL 5913323 (W.D.Wash. 2013),  representing a successful nationwide class challenge to practices preventing asylum applicants from obtaining employment authorization. Much of his litigation is focused on challenges to immigration detention.

Matt is a member of the King County Public Defenders Advisory Board and the National Immigration Project’s Board of Directors. Matt graduated from UC Berkeley Law and received his undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University.