Tara will be working on the Middle East and North Africa Jurisprudence Study, examining various jurisdictions in the region and how they consider video as evidence.

Tara Vassefi, WITNESS Video as Evidence Legal Fellow

Tara recently graduated from the American University Washington College of Law, where she was a recipient of the JD Distinguished Fellowship award. She specialized in International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and worked as a Dean’s Fellow with the War Crimes Research Office advising institutional clients on specialized legal issues in the areas of international criminal and humanitarian law.

She also spent a year as a student attorney with the AU International Human Rights Law Clinic where her clients ranged from asylum-seekers to a Mexican collective of victims of the drug war filing a petition with the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights.

Prior to joining WITNESS and throughout law school, Tara worked as a research analyst and education specialist for a U.S. Department of Defense program that provides graduate level education for military and civilian leaders to establish a regional, geopolitical, and cultural framework for analyzing and understanding the challenges of conducting full spectrum operations in unique and rapidly changing environments.

She studied Arabic in Damascus and Cairo and received an M.A. in International Relations with Middle Eastern Studies from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Niko Efstahiou, the first Google News Fellow working with the WITNESS Media Lab

The Google News Lab Fellowship is a 10-week fellowship program designed for students interested in the intersection of media and technology. Successful applicants join a three-day workshop at Google’s campus in Mountain View, CA where they receive training on a number of digital tools before they join their partner institutions.

Niko holds a B.A. in Political Science from Yale and is currently a second-year student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he is specializing in International Media, Advocacy and Technology. Prior to his Google News Lab Fellowship with WITNESS, he has served as Director of Communications for the NO Project, an award-winning, global educational campaign that targets youth awareness of human trafficking and modern-day slavery, as well as Visual Media Director for NaTakallam, an online platform which pairs displaced Syrians with Arabic learners around the world for language practice. Niko has also worked as a parliamentary advisor intern for the European Parliament, as well as a reporting intern for the Foreign Affairs desk of Kathimerini, Greece’s most circulated newspaper.

Using his experience in digital mapping and data visualization, Niko will be assisting the WITNESS Media Lab in a number of projects, such as the creation of an interactive platform of eyewitness videos documenting human rights abuses in Western Sahara, as well as an overview of existing practices and digital tools for collaborative Human Rights research and documentation projects.

The WITNESS Media Lab is dedicated to advancing the role of eyewitness video in human rights documentation and advocacy through innovative video curation as well as resource development and thought leadership.