Nadim Houry is Human Rights Watch’s senior researcher for Lebanon and Syria and the director of the Beirut office. His talk was entitled ‘Is Lebanon Reformable?’ In the course of his work Nadim has documented violations of international humanitarian law during the July 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. He has also researched human rights violations affecting vulnerable groups in Lebanon such as migrant domestic workers, Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, victims of enforced disappearances and Lebanese detainees in Syria. His work on Syria focuses mostly on arrests of activists and restrictions on freedom of expression.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Nadim served as Deputy Counsel for the Volcker Commission, where he spent over a year conducting fact-finding missions in the Middle East to unearth the facts of the UN’s prominent corruption inquiry into the Oil-for-Food Programme.

An attorney by training, Nadim worked as a corporate lawyer for Shearman & Sterling in New York for the two years prior to his work at the Volcker Commission.