Maha Jweied
Director
Maha Jweied directs a consultancy providing expertise to non-profit and multilateral organizations on access to justice, leveraging insight gained after nearly twelve years in the U.S. Government’s Executive Branch. Her clients include the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, where she supports initiatives on issues such as corporate social responsibility and access to justice, as well as Kids in Need of Defense, where she supports new access to justice initiatives for unaccompanied minors in Europe. She is also active with the Open Government Partnership. Until January 2018, Ms. Jweied served as the Acting Director of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Access to Justice, supporting indigent defense and civil legal aid for low-income and vulnerable communities. In that role, she also served as the Executive Director of the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable and represented the U.S. Government as its indigent defense and legal aid expert in international settings. Before joining DOJ, Ms. Jweied was a senior attorney-advisor at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a litigation associate at Arent Fox, and spent time at Mizan Law Group for Human Rights, a legal aid office in Amman, Jordan. She served as a law clerk to Judge Shahabuddeen of the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Ms. Jweied received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, LL.M. from the London School of Economics, and B.A. from The George Washington University.