2024-25 Tiruchelvam Fellow: Thyagi Ruwanpathirana
The Human Rights Program and the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School are thrilled to welcome the inaugural Neelan Tiruchelvam Fellow, Thyagi Ruwanpathirana.
Thyagi comes to Harvard Law School from Amnesty International, where she served as a South Asia Regional Researcher since 2018. She will spend the 2024 fall term at Harvard Law School researching  meaningful pathways to address the trust deficit between the Sri Lankan State and communities affected by violence. Her project will focus on exploring the groundwork needed to create an enabling environment for a Truth Commission and an effective post-conflict reconciliation process in Sri Lanka.
Thyagi holds an LLB from the University of Warwick and an LLM in Human Rights from Birkbeck College, University of London. Prior to joining Amnesty International, Thyagi was the National Legal Advisor for the International Commission of Jurists. She was also a National Research Consultant with the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms and a Researcher with the Legal and Constitutional unit with the Centre for Policy Alternatives. Thyagi has worked on transitional justice and memorialization, enforced disappearances, reparations for conflict related sexual violence, counter-terrorism legislation, and freedom of expression and association.
About the Neelan Tiruchelvam Fellowship
The Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Fellowship provides opportunities for outstanding legal scholars and practitioners of Sri Lankan background to undertake research, writing, and scholarly engagement on themes related to human rights in Sri Lanka and South Asia. The Fellowship is in honor of the late Neelan Tiruchelvam, a Sri Lankan peace and human rights activist, lawyer, scholar and politician.
