Clooney Foundation For Justice, TrialWatch Program
New York, NY
Haanya Channa will join the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s TrialWatch program as a Kaufman Fellow. At TrialWatch, she will support fair-trial monitoring and strategic advocacy in proceedings across jurisdictions involving journalists, democracy defenders, and others targeted through abusive
legal process. She will analyze trials against international standards, prepare reports and submissions, and support advocacy before domestic, regional, and international bodies.
At HLS, Haanya focused on courts, institutional design, and the legal translation of lived experience.
Through the Dispute Systems Design Clinic, she worked on an ombuds and conflict-system design
project for a multilateral institution, examining trust, confidentiality, and access. She also worked as a
Student Attorney with the Prison Legal Assistance Project, trained with the Harvard Mediation
Program, and researched scholarship on gender, identity, and legal narratives around detransition. Her LL.M. thesis, Affective Translation: Law, Emotion, and Governance in Global South Courts, theorized how heterodox Global South courts absorb vulnerability and translate social suffering into forms of recognition and governance that may dignify harm while stabilizing the conditions that produced it.
Before Harvard, Haanya clerked at the Supreme Court of Pakistan, including for its Constitutional Bench, during a period of major constitutional transition, and later coordinated the Court’s Law Clerkship Program. She earned her B.A.-LL.B. (Honours), with a minor in History, from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), graduating with High Distinction. Across her work, she has remained concerned with how law decides who is heard, what is made legible, and how institutions might be accountable to the people whose lives they shape.