Rothna Begum

Rothna Begum is the women’s rights researcher for the Middle East and North Africa region. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Rothna worked for Amnesty International where she acquired five and a half years’ knowledge and experience of researching human rights in the Middle East and North Africa region. She gained expertise on the Gulf primarily specializing in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, and Oman, but has also spent some time working on Iran, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait. She researched and campaigned on a whole host of human rights issues in such countries including on freedom of expression, association and assembly, counter-terrorism, women’s rights, refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, corporal punishment and the death penalty. Rothna holds a LLB in Law and a LLM in Legal Theory from the London School Economics and Political Science. She speaks Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic.