Dr Sima Samar

Sima Samar is a doctor for the poor, an educator of the marginalised and a human rights defender. She established and nurtured the Shuhada Organization that operated more than one hundred schools and dozens of hospitals and clinics. Samar served i the Interim Administration of Afghanistan and established the first-ever Ministry of Women's Affairs. From 2002-2019, she chaired the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, a commitment that has put her own life at great risk. Having served as the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Sudan from 2005 to 2009, she was appointed in 2019 as a member of both the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement and the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation. She is currently a visiting scholar at Tufts University's Fletcher School.