About: melysa

Melysa Sperber is the Senior Staff Writer & Editor for Vital Voices Global Partnership. Prior to joining Vital Voices, Melysa was a Staff Attorney at the Tahirih Justice Center, a non-profit legal services and advocacy agency that provides services to women fleeing gender-based persecution. Melysa handled a caseload of over eighty immigration matters involving domestic violence survivors, human trafficking victims, asylum seekers, and victims of violent crime. During law school, Ms. Sperber received two Equal Justice Fellowships for her work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland and for her time as a law clerk with Public Citizen Litigation Group. In the summer of 2002, Melysa worked in The Gambia as a law clerk for the African Commission for Human and People’s Rights. Melysa also served as a research assistant for Professor David Scheffer, former Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, for Professor Susan Dellar Ross, the Director of the Women’s International Human Rights Clinic, and for the Institute for the Study of International Migration, where she organized a series of events featuring anti-trafficking activists from Eastern Europe and Russia. Prior to law school, Melysa worked as an investigator for the D.C. Public Defender Service, as a volunteer lobbyist with Women Strike for Peace assisting efforts to pass the Ottawa Convention, and as an intern in the White House in the Office of Political Affairs. In March 2007, the faculty of George Washington University Law School voted to approve Melysa as an adjunct professor of law for Spring 2008 when she will teach Refugee and Asylum Law.

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