Class of 2008-09   International Women’s Human Rights Clinic Georgetown University Law Center 600 New Jersey Ave NW Washington, DC 20001 Phone: (202) 662-9000 Email: schveya@law.georgetown.edu

Profile:

Aram received his Bachelor’s Degree from Harvard University and an Master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.  He is a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center.    After law school, Aram served as Litigation Counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonpartisan religious-liberty watchdog group dedicated to preserving religious freedom.  He litigated a number of cases arising under the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause.  He also engaged in advocacy and other non-litigation efforts, and taught seminars on American church-state jurisprudence to foreign visitors.  From 2004 to 2005, Aram served as the Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights at the Fordham University School of Law.  He taught a course on anti-Roma (Gypsy) discrimination in the Romanian education system and led his students on a fact-finding mission throughout Romania, culminating in a comprehensive report with recommendations.  In addition, he administered a human-rights scholarship program and oversaw a lecture series. Aram has also served as an international-litigation associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, and clerked for Judge Jack B. Weinstein (Eastern District of New York) and Judge Allen G. Schwartz (Southern District of New York).  He previously served as a stagiaire in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and in the Secretariat of the International Court of Arbitration. He was born and raised in the Netherlands, and speaks Dutch, French, and Italian.

As a Teaching Fellow with the International Women's Rights Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center, Aram supervises student projects in the clinic (formally in collaboration with Tzili Mor)and has also collaborated with the LAWA Fellows Moza Jadeed, Jane Kamangu, Janet Maina, and Esther Ayuk as well as with U.S. Fellows Aziza Ahmed and Brook Kelly.  For example, one fall 2008 project was a legal challenge to Kenyan laws criminalizing HIV transmission.  Aram indicated that while the laws were a well-intentioned effort to help control the spread of HIV, the statutes are at best ineffective, and at worst discriminate against women.  Women in Kenya are more like to have HIV than men, more likely to be involved in transactional or survival sex, and less likely to be in a position to negotiate safe-sex practices.  The second project Aram supervised was a legal challenge to mandatory-HIV-testing regulations. The regulations in question require HIV testing for pregnant women, based on the notion that pregnant women can be treated and appropriate prophylaxis can be administered to prevent mother-to-child transmission.  But while the laws are perhaps motivated by a legitimate concern (promoting the woman’s and newborn’s health), they violate women’s rights under both domestic and international law because they are mandatory and are contrary to the human rights standard and medical principle of informed consent.  In November, the entire clinic traveled to Geneva, where they presented the student-written “shadow report” detailing Kenya’s violations of women’s rights to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.  They also observed the review of Myanmar/Burma by the UN Committee overseeing implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).  Additionally, they had the opportunity to conduct interviews with a number of gender-rights, human-rights, and global-health experts.  The clinic participants also met with representatives at UNAIDS and at the World Health Organization, a U.N. official working with the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, an advisor for the Global Fund on HIV/AIDS.  They also attended the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights’ review of the official governmental report from Kenya.  In the Spring 2009 semester, Aram and Tzili supervised clinical students on projects in Guyana and Washington, DC, culminating in a report that the clinic presented in April on “HIV & Women’s Human Rights:  Obstacles to Prevention, Treatment, & Care at Home & Abroad.” The invitation noted that the clinic conducted two parallel fact-finding investigations in DC and Guyana to explore the links between women’s human rights and HIV /AIDS.  Student advocates interviewed dozens of women affected by HIV/AIDS, healthcare providers, NGOs, and government officials.  Despite radically different resource levels, both locations exhibit similar HIV rates and gendered dynamics fueling an epidemic in need of a human rights approach.  Their research indicated that Washington, D.C., has a severe epidemic with every mode of transmission increasing, and that the trend indicates a greater percentage of women are becoming infected. In Guyana, which is one of 15 special focus countries under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), HIV/AIDS is the number one killer of Guyanese ages 25 to 44.  The students presented their preliminary findings and ideas for proposed recommendations.

In the Fall 2009 semester, he supervised litigation projects in Cameroon challenging an adultery law that defines adultery more leniently for men than women, and a series of “head-of-household” provisions that declare the husband to be the head of the household, and entitle him to veto his wife’s employment, decide the location of the marital home, and manage the marital property.