Smita Narula is a Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University School of Law, and Assistant Professor of Clinical Law of the International Human Rights Clinic. Her research, litigation, and advocacy projects focus on key human rights issues including: discrimination on the basis of caste, race, and religion, and gender; human rights violations in the “war on terror”; the promotion of economic and social rights; and the accountability of corporations and international financial institutions for human rights abuses. Narula is co-author and co-project director of two reports published by CHRGJ in 2007: Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India ’s “Untouchables,” and Americans on Hold: Profiling, Citizenship, and the “War on Terror.” Her June 2006 article in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, titled The Right to Food: Holding Global Actors Accountable Under International Law, looks at the need to close accountability gaps for human rights abuses arising out of corporate conduct and international financial institution monetary arrangements.  Her current research focuses on the normative content of the obligation to ensure substantive equality under international law.  Before joining NYU in August 2003, Narula spent six years at Human Rights Watch, first as the organization’s India researcher and later as Senior Researcher for South Asia . In this capacity, she oversaw Human Rights Watch’s work on India , Pakistan , Sri Lanka , Bangladesh and Nepal , and helped coordinate the organization’s response to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan . Narula has conducted numerous human rights investigations in Asia on topics such as: bonded child labor; abuses related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic; caste discrimination; state-sponsored massacres; the marginalization of religious minorities; gender-based violence; and violations of the right to education. She has also regularly briefed U.N. agencies, international human rights treaty bodies, government officials, and the English, French and Hindi/Urdu media on her findings. She has authored a variety of reports and articles on caste discrimination worldwide and on the rise of religious nationalism in South Asia, including a book-length report titled Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s ‘Untouchables’ for which she received the 1999 Human Rights Award from India’s Dalit Liberation Education Trust, presented by former Indian Supreme Court Chief Justice J.S. Verma. In 1998 Narula helped form the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights in India , a grassroots movement to help expose and eradicate ‘untouchability’ and other grave abuses against India ’s population of 165 million Dalits or so-called untouchables. In 2000 Narula co-founded the International Dalit Solidarity Network, which brings together international organizations, donor agencies, and non-governmental groups to build a world-wide movement against caste discrimination in Asia and Africa . In 1997, Narula graduated from Harvard Law School , where she was Editor-in-chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. Before law school, Narula received a Masters in International Development from Brown University and worked on HIV and public health at UNICEF and the United Nations Development Fund. Narula has also taught human rights advocacy and documentation at Columbia University ’s Center for the Study of Human Rights.

Read Professor Narula’s report on racial profiling against Arabs, South Asians and Muslims in U.S. Citizenship Applications.

Read Professor Narula’s briefing paper on behavioral profiling as a proxy for racial profiling in shoot to kill policies in the "war on terror".

 Read Professor Narula’s shadow report on India to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

 Read Professor Narula’s testimony at the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus Briefing on "Untouchables: The Plight of Dalit Women".

Click here to read Prof. Narula’s C.V.

Clcik here to read Prof. Narula’s Bellagio abstract.