Lisa Magarrell

Independent advisor and resource on human rights, justice, and people’s/national security.

Lisa has spent most of her 40-plus year career as a human rights lawyer working in the context of war or systemic histories of deep injustice, violence, and repression. In the US and in many places around the world, she has supported local efforts to achieve justice, accountability, and redress for civil society movements and survivors. That has given her a comparative view of the problems – and a critical take on proposed solutions -- at the intersection of national security and human rights.

In the Pacific Northwest in the 1980’s, Lisa engaged in farmworker legal work in Washington’s Yakima Valley and legal support to Central American asylum seekers in the Seattle area. She then worked through the next decade in El Salvador with a local human rights organization and in Guatemala with the UN, documenting rights abuses on the ground as violence surged in the process of moving from armed conflict to the early stages of a negotiated peace. Returning to the US in 2000, Lisa worked with the International Center for Transitional Justice on truth-seeking and reparative justice efforts around the world and in the US. She helped advise the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission that looked deeply into the 1979 killings of five community activists by white supremacists and nazis in North Carolina.

From 2012-2021, she led a project at Open Society Foundations on national security and human rights. There, Lisa supported work to surface the facts and human impact of CIA and military torture, litigate problems with the military commissions process, and contest indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay prison. She also helped to build civil rights capacity of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian legal organizations, reform sweeping US government surveillance powers, and increase government transparency surrounding the U.S. use of force. Since 2021 she has continued to work with partners on a project to reframe the dominant national security narrative to better reflect a human-centered and just approach in an interconnected world of collective challenges.

She received her JD from the University of Iowa, a degree in legal sciences from the University of El Salvador, and an LLM from Columbia University law school, where she was a human rights fellow. She is the co-author of Learning from Greensboro: Truth and Reconciliation in the United States, among other publications.