Freedom House is pleased to host a roundtable with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom on the anti-extremism legal frameworks in China, Pakistan, and Russia. Moderated by Freedom House President David Kramer, the on-the-record roundtable will provide an opportunity for participants to engage experts and authors of The Law Library of Congress’s report Legal Provisions on Fighting Extremism. The participants will compare and contrast the differing approaches to anti-extremism laws in China, Pakistan, and Russia. The round table comes at an important time as repressive regimes are developing anti-extremism laws and implementing them in broad terms to suppress criticism.
This event is on the record.
Opening Statement: David J. Kramer, President, Freedom House
Introduction: Knox Thames, Director of Policy and Research, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom
Featuring panelists:
- Tariq Ahmad, Foreign Law Specialist, Law Library of Congress
- Virab Khachatryan, Foreign Law Specialist at the Global Legal Research Center
- Peter Roudik, Director of Legal Research, Global Legal Research Center
- Aleksandr Verhovsky, Director, SOVA Center
- Laney Zhang, Senior Foreign Law Specialist, Global Legal Research Center
To RSVP for this event, please select the following link:
Anti-Extremism Laws in Russia, Pakistan, and China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
Please RSVP by November 7th at noon.
Speaker Biographies
David J. Kramer is President of Freedom House. Prior to joining Freedom House, Mr. Kramer was a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and Adjunct Professor at the Elliott School for International Affairs at George Washington University. Before joining GMF, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from March 2008 to January 2009. He was also Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, responsible for Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, as well as for regional non-proliferation issues. Previously, he served as a Professional Staff Member in the Secretary of State’s Office of Policy Planning, and before that as Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs. Mr. Kramer received a Master’s degree in Soviet studies from Harvard University and a Bachelor’s degree in Soviet Studies and Political Science from Tufts University.
Knox Thames joined the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom in February 2009. Before coming to the Commission, he worked in the Office of International Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of State, and was the lead State Department officer on religious freedom issues in multilateral fora, such as the UN and OSCE. Mr. Thames also served as Counsel for six years at the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the Helsinki Commission), where he was the point-person on religious freedom matters, on issues involving refugees and internally displaced persons, and focused on democracy and human rights in Central Asia. In 2004, Mr. Thames was appointed by the State Department to serve as one of the two U.S. experts on the OSCE Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief. Mr. Thames earned a J.D. with honors from the American University Washington College of Law. He also holds a Master's in International Affairs from the American University School of International Service. An author of numerous articles on a range of human rights issues, his book International Religious Freedom Advocacy was released in August 2009 by Baylor University Press.
Tariq Ahmad completed his BA in political science at Ohio State University. Subsequently he went abroad to London to complete his law degree at University College London (UCL). During his studies he pursued a few internships in Dubai. He returned to the U.S. after the completion of his LLB at UCL, and subsequently started working on an LLM at the Washington College of Law (WCL) at American University. During his studies he had the opportunity to intern at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and as a foreign legal specialist at the Public International Law & Policy Group (PILPG). He also had the opportunity to intern at the Law Library of Congress in the Global Legal Research Center, working primarily on requests relating to UK law.
Virab Khachatryan is a foreign law specialist at the Law Library of Congress. His jurisdictional coverage includes post-Soviet and East European countries. With a law degree from Yerevan State University of Armenia, he was awarded the Edmund S. Muskie scholarship to study at the American University’s Washington College of Law, from which he graduated in May 2012. Mr. Khachatryan’s professional portfolio includes practice in a law firm, experience in public administration and international law with Armenian Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defense, and Yerevan Office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Before arriving to the US in 2011, he worked as a legal advisor to the First Deputy Minister of Defense of Armenia, covering public international law, public relations, and defense management reforms.
Peter Roudik received his education in Moscow and Budapest, Hungary. He earned a JSD from the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences, then the premiere Russian legal research institution. While there, he met leading legal scholars from Russia and around the world, and established his professional network. Working at the institution, he got an inside knowledge of parliamentary affairs. At the same time, he taught legal history and comparative law at the Russian State Classics Academy Law School. His first encounter with the U.S. legal system occurred at the Central European University in Budapest, where faculty from the United States taught American law to East European students. Thanks to the John W. Palmer scholarship, he was able to compare his theoretical knowledge with real life at the Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio. In 1994 he moved to the United States to work for the Center for East European Constitutionalism at the University of Chicago Law School. The Center conducted comparative constitutional studies and published the East-European Constitutional Review, the first law journal dedicated to analysis of constitutional reforms in the former Soviet bloc. In Chicago, he cooperated with the law firm McBreen, McBreen & Kopko where he learned more about American legal practice. In 1996, he was hired by the Law Library of Congress to work as a legal specialist covering the former Soviet countries and moved to D.C.
Alexander Verkhovsky is the founder and director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, a Moscow-based NGO that monitors and analyzes political extremism, ultranationalism, xenophobia, freedom of religion, and the use and misuse of counter-extremism measures in Russia. An expert on judicial responses to hate speech and various forms of radical activity, Mr. Verkhovsky helped draft “Hate Crimes Laws: A Practical Guide,” a project of the OSCE and ODIHR, and received a Human Rights First Fellowship in 2010. He previously worked as vice president of Panorama Information and Research Center and as editor-in-chief of Panorama newspaper. He has authored numerous publications, including Contemporary Discourse Competition Between Russian Nationalists and Federal Authorities (2011). Currently a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, Mr. Verkhovsky is studying legislation against hate crimes and hate-related activity passed in the United States, European Union, and the former Soviet republics, identifying common themes and trends, and developing methods to enhance the legal framework and possible enforcement mechanisms in Russia.
Laney Zhang is a Senior Foreign Law Specialist at the Global Legal Research Center (GLRC) of the Law Library of Congress. Her research at the GLRC covers mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Singapore. She is admitted to the New York Bar. Ms. Zhang is also an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where in 2010-2011 she taught a course “Chinese for Lawyers: Distinctive Aspects of Chinese Law.” She is an occasional guest lecturer on Chinese law at the American University Washington College of Law. Prior to joining the GLRC, Ms. Zhang practiced at a leading global law firm in Shanghai. She has also served as a post-graduate research scholar and Edwards Fellow at Columbia Law School, a visiting lecturer at Duke Law School, and an Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Nanjing University Law School. Ms. Zhang obtained her LL.M. degree from Duke Law School, where she served as an editor of the Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law. During law school in China, she was an oralist in the national champion team of China at the 10th Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot; she also coached the team of Nanjing University in the following year and the team to the 2004 Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court in China.
To RSVP for this event, please select the following link:
Anti-Extremism Laws in Russia, Pakistan, and China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization