#JusticeForJamal: Five Years Since the Murder of Jamal Khashoggi
On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist, was brutally murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul with the direct approval of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). His assassination sparked international outrage as governments, journalists, and businesses tried to reckon with this horrific act. Five years later, the international community has welcomed the crown prince back into the fold despite the lack of justice or accountability for the murder. As a result, MBS has escalated his campaign of repression and become an even bigger threat to human rights in Saudi Arabia and around the world.
Please join The Freedom Initiative, Project on Middle East Democracy, ALQST for Human Rights, Committee to Protect Journalists, Democracy for the Arab World Now, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, and PEN America as we commemorate the life and legacy of Jamal Khashoggi and commit to safeguarding the rights of dissidents.
Pre-Recorded Opening Remarks:
- Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA)
Chair of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security, Democracy, Human Rights, & Global Women’s Issues - Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relation Committee - Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)
Chair of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia and Counterterrorism - Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA)
Co-chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee’s Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission - Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY)
Ranking Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee
Speakers:
- Omar Abdulaziz
Omar Abdulaziz is a Saudi dissident and video blogger based in Montreal, Canada. He was close friends and worked with Jamal Khashoggi on various initiatives after leaving Saudi Arabia in 2017. In 2018, he was targeted by Saudi hackers and his conversations with Khashoggi were intercepted. - Karen Attiah
Karen Attiah is the Global Opinions editor for the Washington Post, where she recruited Jamal Khashoggi as a contributor. She has written extensively about his murder and called for an investigation and accountability. In 2019, she won a George Polk Award for her writing and was named 2019 Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black journalists for her coverage of Khashoggi’s murder. - Lina al-Hathloul
Lina al-Hathloul is a Saudi human rights defender and head of monitoring and advocacy at ALQST for Human Rights. She is the sister of Saudi women’s rights defender and former political prisoner Loujain al-Hathloul.
Moderator:
- Akbar Shahid Ahmed
Akbar Shahid Ahmed is HuffPost’s senior foreign affairs reporter based in Washington, D.C. He has reported from across the Muslim-majority world and has written extensively on the death and aftermath of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.
Video Remarks:
- Hatice Cengiz, fiancée of Jamal Khashoggi
Merve Tahiroğlu is POMED’s Turkey Program Coordinator. Prior to joining POMED in September 2019, Merve was a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where she focused on Turkey’s domestic politics, foreign policy, and relationship with Washington. She has authored several monographs and published articles in outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Politico, and Huffington Post.
Özge Zihnioğlu is a lecturer at the University of Liverpool’s Department of Politics. Her research focuses on Turkish civil society, activism, EU-Turkey relations, and EU civil society support. She is the author of EU-Turkey Relations: Civil Society and Depoliticization (Routledge, 2020) and European Union Civil Society Policy and Turkey: A Bridge Too Far? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She is a member of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Civic Research Network, and an executive committee member of Turkey’s Young Academy Working Group.
Amy Hawthorne (moderator) is POMED’s Deputy Director for Research. Before joining POMED in 2015, Ms. Hawthorne was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. In 2011-12, she served as Senior Advisor and then Egypt Coordinator in the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau at the Department of State. Her other previous positions include executive director of the Hollings Center for International Dialogue in Istanbul and Washington, D.C., fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and senior program officer for the Middle East at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. 
Monica Marks is a professor at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and a scholar of Islamist movements, gender, and politics in the Middle East and North Africa. Her research focuses on broad topics across the region and beyond, but especially in regard to the tensions between pluralism and state power in the two countries where she’s lived longest: Tunisia and Turkey.
Amna Guellali is Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, based in Tunis. Previously, she was the director of the Tunis office of Human Rights Watch and was responsible for research on Tunisia and Algeria in the organization’s Middle East and North Africa division, investigating human rights abuses in both countries. Before joining Human Rights Watch, Dr. Guellali worked as an analyst at the office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague and as Senior Researcher at the department of international law at the Asser Institute. She has also served as legal officer at the regional delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Tunis. Dr. Guellali holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. In 2017, she was awarded POMED’s Leaders for Democracy Award.
Mohamed-Dhia Hammami is an independent researcher and analyst. After growing up in the suburbs of Tunis under the Ben Ali regime, Mr. Hammami took part in the 2011 revolution and then got involved in public life as a student activist at the University of Tunis and as a parliamentary assistant in the National Constituent Assembly. He subsequently worked as a journalist at Nawaat and as a researcher and a consultant for IWatch, the Truth and Dignity Commission, the Natural Resources Governance Institute, Lawyers Without Borders, and the University of York on corruption and other natural resources-related issues. Mr. Hammami received his BA from Wesleyan University. This fall, he will begin a PhD program at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
Stephen McInerney (moderator) is the executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED). Prior to joining POMED in 2007, he had spent six years living, working, and studying in the Middle East and North Africa—two years each in Egypt, Lebanon, and Qatar. He spent two years in a master’s degree program in the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut, one year on a fellowship at the Center for Arab Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo, and three years teaching at Cairo American College and the American School of Doha. He received a master’s degree from Stanford University and is fluent in Arabic.
Bessma Momani is Full Professor of Political Science and Assistant Vice-President of Research and International in the Office of Research at the University of Waterloo. She is also a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI) and a nonresident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute of Washington. Dr. Momani has previously been a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Stimson Center, and was a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Mortara Center. She was a 2015 Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and a 2011-12 Fulbright Scholar. She is a regular contributor to national and international media on Arab politics and on global economic governance issues. She has written editorials for the New York Times, Economist, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, among others. Dr. Momani received her BA from the University of Toronto, MA from the University of Guelph, and PhD from the University of Western Ontario.
Curtis Ryan is Professor of Political Science at Appalachian State University. Dr. Ryan served as a 1992-93 Fulbright Scholar at the Center for Strategic Studies, University of Jordan and was twice named a Peace Scholar by the United States Institute of Peace. In addition to his contributions to Middle East Report, his articles have been published in the Middle East Journal, the British Journal of Middle East Studies, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, World Politics Review, Arab Studies Quarterly, Israel Affairs, Orient, Southeastern Political Review, Journal of Third World Studies, Middle East Policy, and the Journal of Middle East Law and Governance. He is the author of three books: Jordan in Transition: From Hussein to Abdullah (2002), Inter-Arab Alliances: Regime Security and Jordanian Foreign Policy (2009) and Jordan and the Arab Uprisings – Regime Survival and Politics Beyond the State (2018). He received his BA in History and Political Science from Drew University and his MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Sean Yom is Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Senior Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a specialist on regimes and governance in the Middle East, especially in Arab monarchies like Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco. Dr. Yom’s research engages topics of authoritarian politics, democratic reforms, institutional stability, and economic development in these countries, as well as their implications for U.S. foreign policy. His publications include the books From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East (2016) and Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, 9th edition (2020); articles in print journals such as Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Journal of Democracy; and contributions in online venues like Foreign Affairs, Middle East Eye, and the Washington Post. Dr. Yom also advises country-level work with international NGOs, law firms, and sovereign clients. Dr. Yom received his BA from Brown University and his PhD from Harvard University.
Arwa Shobaki is POMED’s Managing Director. She has spent her career dedicated to the nonprofit sector, helping to manage, design, and lead Middle East and North Africa rights-based initiatives. She has worked with the International Organization for Migration, American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, Club of Madrid, and the International Commission of Jurists. Her work has focused primarily on supporting freedom of association and expression and on promoting democratic policies and principles in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen. Prior to joining POMED in 2013, Shobaki worked with the Open Society Justice Initiative and as a summer associate with the Center for National Security Studies, where she focused on freedom of information and expression research. She received her MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, LLB from the University of Edinburgh, and LLM in Law and Government from the Washington College of Law. She began her career as an anthropology major and Peace Corps Volunteer in Mauritania.
Karin Karlekar is PEN America’s Writers at Risk director. She has two decades of experience in global free expression, press freedom, and digital rights issues, as well as advocacy and assistance work on behalf of writers, bloggers, and journalists. Dr. Karlekar has developed index methodologies and conducted training sessions on press freedom, internet freedom, freedom of expression, and monitoring dangerous speech; authored a number of special reports and academic papers; and conducted advocacy missions across the globe.
Asena Günal is a cofounder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship cases in the arts in Turkey, and executive director of Anadolu Kültür, a nonprofit that promotes art and culture production across Turkey. Günal currently is also the program coordinator of Depo, a center for arts and culture in the Tophane neighborhood of Istanbul, and was previously an editor at İletişim Publishing House from 1998 to 2005. Günal is a winner of the 2019 Franco-German Human Rights and the Rule of Law Prize.
Burhan Sönmez is the author of five novels that have been translated into 42 languages. He was born in Turkey and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer in Istanbul before going to Britain as a political exile. His writing has appeared in papers including The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and la Repubblica. He received the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation’s “Disturbing the Peace” Award in 2017 and the EBRD Literature Prize in 2018. A Board member of PEN International, he divides his time between Istanbul (Turkey) and Cambridge (UK).
Caroline Stockford is a translator of Turkish poetry and literature and PEN Norway’s Turkey adviser. She has translated the poetry of classic and contemporary Turkish poets at the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature for the past three years and is currently translating two Turkish novels and co-translating the poetry of Küçük İskender into Welsh.
Erol Önderoğlu is a Turkish-French journalist and representative of Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF). In 2016, he was arrested by the Turkish government under the accusation of assisting terrorists for his work supporting Ozgur Gundem, a Kurdish newspaper. In 2018, Önderoğlu received the Roosevelt Foundation’s Four Freedoms Award regarding freedom of speech, which cited his “tireless and persistent dedication to defend the freedom of speech and expression.”
Merve Tahiroğlu (moderator) is the Turkey program coordinator at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), a Washington-based research and advocacy NGO focused on human rights and democracy in the Middle East. Prior to joining POMED, Tahiroğlu was a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where she focused on Turkey’s domestic politics, foreign policy, and relationship with Washington. Tahiroğlu has authored several monographs on Turkey and published articles in various outlets such as Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, POLITICO, NBC, and HuffPost.