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Tarek Z. Ismail is an Associate Professor of Law at the CUNY School of Law. Prior to joining CUNY Law’s faculty, he served as Senior Staff Attorney at the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project, which primarily aims to address the legal needs of Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and other communities in the New York City area that are particularly affected by national security and counterterrorism policies and practices deployed by various law enforcement agencies.
Prior to joining CLEAR, Tarek was a staff attorney in the Family Defense Practice at the Brooklyn Defender Services.
From 2011-2013, Tarek was the Counterterrorism & Human Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute. In that role, Tarek researched and wrote on issues ranging from administrative detention, targeted killings, and US domestic counterterrorism policy. Tarek is the lead author on a report co-published with Human Rights Watch, which examined and exposed human rights abuses in domestic counterterrorism prosecutions, Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions, and has written and spoken widely on related issues.
Tarek holds a law degree from Columbia Law School, where he served as a Notes & Submissions Editor for the Human Rights Law Review. As a student and teaching assistant in the Human Rights Clinic, Tarek researched and wrote on US counterterrorism policy, including the use of diplomatic assurances as a mechanism to deport individuals to torture. Tarek is a graduate of the University of Virginia.
