Supporting the rule of law and confronting some of the world’s most egregious human rights abuses are all in a day’s work for Amrit Singh. This includes helping expose the Saudi crown prince as the architect of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and winning groundbreaking lawsuits in the European Court of Human Rights regarding secret CIA prisons.

In March 2023, Singh joined Stanford Law School to launch and lead the new Rule of Law Impact Lab, which employs legal tools such as litigation, research, and advocacy to counter the decline of democracy around the world. “Ultimately, almost everything I have done in my legal career, whether addressing U.S. national security-related rights violations through the ACLU or global litigation through the Open Society Justice Initiative, has been about upholding the rule of law,” asserts Singh, who says she found her “intellectual home” in the law after switching from a career in economics to focus on civil rights as a student at Yale Law School.

The forces moving against democracy and the rule of law are coordinated, Singh says. According to the Varieties of Democracy Institute, by the end of 2022, 72 percent of the world’s population were living in autocracies, and many of the advances in global levels of democracy made over the previous 35 years had been eviscerated.

“They are sharing ideas and strategies. The central insight for the Impact Lab is that there needs to be an internationally coordinated resistance to these forces of democratic decline,” she says.

Personal Democratic Values

Singh grew up in India where she witnessed widespread poverty from a young age. “My initial choice to study economics was motivated by a desire to address economic injustice,” she says. “In the law, I ultimately found a more holistic language for addressing injustice along various dimensions.”

As a staff attorney at the ACLU, she litigated a successful challenge to the Bush administration’s extreme secrecy relating to its post-September 11, 2001, torture program. This landmark litigation publicly disclosed hundreds of thousands of pages of U.S. government records documenting the systemic torture of detainees held in U.S. custody abroad, including the infamous “torture memos.” Her litigation also obtained the first U.S. court decision to hold that the U.S. government could not remove a non-citizen on the basis of anti-torture “diplomatic assurances” without sufficient due process prior to removal.

When she joined the nonprofit Open Society Justice Initiative in 2009, Singh’s human rights-focused practice went global, obtaining, among other legal wins, landmark European Court of Human Rights judgments holding Poland and Romania accountable for their complicity in CIA torture.

“Amrit has a profound personal devotion to the furtherance of democratic values,” says Aryeh Neier, former president of Open Society Foundations, former executive director of the ACLU, and founding executive director of Human Rights Watch. “She has always sought to go up against the most sweeping human rights abuses affecting vulnerable people around the world, whether that is restraints on freedom of expression, torture, repressive counterterrorism measures, drone killings, or arbitrary detention.”

In October 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Singh brought litigation in U.S. federal court and conducted extensive advocacy seeking disclosure of records relating to the murder, including an official U.S. intelligence report that confirmed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) directed the killing. The Biden administration ultimately released the intelligence report in February 2021. “Public disclosure of this official document was a step forward, but clearly not enough for accountability,” says Singh, adding that “it shows the limits of relying on
governments to enforce a principled resistance to authoritarianism.”

The Lab’s Global Focus

Almost as soon as she moved into her office at SLS, Singh dove into the first Impact Lab project: confronting a slew of anti-democratic maneuvers by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The lab filed an amicus brief before the Mexican Supreme Court on behalf of the Mexican Bar Association. The brief, which was widely covered in the Mexican press, encouraged the court to uphold its role in protecting Mexico’s democracy and reject López Obrador’s so-called “Plan B,” which sought to cripple Mexico’s highly regarded National Electoral Institute (INE), responsible for election oversight. Singh’s El Pais opinion piece urged the Biden administration to support independent institutions resisting democratic decline in Mexico.

“Our brief explained why the legislation seeking to gut INE ran afoul of international legal standards, and the Supreme Court subsequently invalidated that legislation on procedural grounds,” Singh says. “But attacks on independent institutions—including the federal judiciary—continue in Mexico, which means we have a lot of work to do with our partners on the ground.”

The lab is already working on other countries in addition to Mexico. Singh says she has received “a tremendous response” from organizations around the world that want the lab’s services, which focus on electoral integrity, judicial independence, and free expression. “Confronting democratic decline around the world is, admittedly, a lot of work. But this is the defining issue of our time, and I am ready.”  SL