Schell Center Postgraduate Fellows Announced for 2026-27

The Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights has announced that seven Yale Law School students will receive a Robert L. Bernstein Fellowship in International Human Rights or a Robina International Human Rights Fellowship for the 2026–27 academic year.

Both fellowships fund full-time human rights work for recent graduates of Yale Law School. The Bernstein Fellowship supports a year of full-time work in human rights advocacy. The Robina Fellowship also funds full-time human rights work, particularly at international or foreign courts and tribunals and intergovernmental human rights agencies.

Read about this cohort of fellows and their projects.

Tasneem Hussain ’26 LLM
Robina Fellow
Constitutional Court, Republic of South Africa

Tasneem Hussain will spend her Robina Fellowship year at the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Johannesburg, where she will clerk for Justice Jody Kollapen. As a foreign law clerk, her primary responsibilities will include attending court hearings, conducting legal research, and assisting with the drafting of judgments. Through this clerkship, Hussain will deepen her understanding of how courts translate constitutional principles into enforceable human rights protection by examining South Africa's approach to justiciable socio-economic rights and transformative constitutionalism.

As a Sudanese, Hussain has long considered a central question: how can law safeguard human rights amid state fragility and weak institutions? South Africa’s transition from apartheid shows that institutions grounded in human dignity and accountability can create lasting frameworks for protecting rights. South Africa’s story provides the foundation for Hussain’s future research on human rights protection in post-conflict states. It will also support her long-term goal of contributing to the rebuilding of Sudan's legal institutions.

At Yale Law School, Hussain’s work has centered on international human rights and comparative constitutional law. She was a member of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, where she developed her legal research and analytical skills navigating the international human rights system, and was also an articles editor for the Yale Journal of International Law and a board member of the African Law Students Association. Before Yale, Hussain completed her JD in Qatar, MA in Global Diplomacy from SOAS, and was a Research Fellow for the UNESCO Chair for Sustainable Development. Alongside her studies, she worked to advance youth empowerment across the Middle East and North Africa, equipping young people with the skills and confidence to advocate for their causes.

Gabriel Klapholz ’26
Robina Fellow
European Court of Human Rights, France

Gabriel Klapholz will spend his Robina Fellowship year in Strasbourg, France, clerking at the European Court of Human Rights and working for the Directorate of the Jurisconsult. Klapholz’s studies and research in law school have centered on international law, LGBTQ rights, and the First Amendment. At the ECtHR, Klapholz hopes to deepen his understanding of international law and the power of multilateral treaties. He hopes to bring this knowledge back to the United States to help expand the country's adherence to international law and its respect for global human rights.

During law school, Klapholz has served as executive editor of the Yale Law Journal Forum, managing editor of the Yale Journal of International Law, and executive notes editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review. He published two prize-winning student notes, one in the Yale Law Journal on the Catholic Church’s international treaty regime and another in the Dukeminier Awards Journal on the confluence of LGBTQ rights and the First Amendment. Klapholz was a Herbert J. Hansell Fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges and a Salzburg Cutler Fellow at the Lloyd N. Cutler Center for the Rule of Law. He also served as a Coker Fellow in constitutional law for Paul Gewirtz, the Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law. Klapholz holds a B.A. from Yale, where he was a Human Rights Scholar at the Schell Center and studied history and global affairs.

Florian Kriener ’26 LLM
Bernstein Fellow
Heinrich Boell Foundation, Germany

Florian Kriener will spend his Bernstein Fellowship year with the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin and Kyiv. Working with Ukrainian civil society representatives he will engage with the ongoing peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. The project focuses on a human rights sensitive approach that can provide a path to accountability within the emerging peace framework. Through the fellowship, Kriener wants to contribute to a peaceful resolution of the ongoing aggression against Ukraine that does not undermine the fundamental principles of international law and human rights law.

At Law School, Kriener’s research centered on the Ukraine-Russia Peace Process and the regulatory changes in critical infrastructure resulting from the current geopolitical shift, which he developed as supervised research with Professors Harold Hongju Koh and Oona A. Hathaway. He served as articles and features editor with the Yale Journal of International Law and was a member of the National Security Group. Florian was selected as a Salzburg Cutler Fellow and recipient of the Sterling Law Scholarship and ERP-Scholarship from the German Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Before Yale, Kriener clerked with the German Foreign Office’s International Law Department and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. He holds a Ph.D. in Public International Law (summa cum laude) from the Max Planck Institute of Comparative Public Law and International Law that focuses on international assistance to nonviolent protest movements. He completed his legal training in Heidelberg, Germany (First State Exam) and Berlin, Germany (Second State Exam). Florian’s research has been published in the British Yearbook of International Law, the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, the Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, the Heidelberg Journal of International Law and is forthcoming in the American Journal of International Law.

Laura Plata ’26
Bernstein Fellow
Human Rights First, U.S.

Laura Plata will spend their Bernstein Fellowship year working with Human Right First’s Refugee Protection program, where they will document human rights abuses and violations experienced by individuals on ICE enforcement flights and lead litigation disrupting the privatized infrastructure underpinning deportation flights. Human Rights First advances the rights of asylum-seekers through research, policy advocacy, direct representation, and impact litigation.  

At Yale Law School, Plata has been a member of the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, where they represented clients in labor and immigration matters, and the Environmental Justice Law and Advocacy Clinic (EJLAC) where they represented clients on environmental justice issues. They have also worked with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project supporting litigation and advocacy on behalf of immigrant workers, and served as a board member of the Immigrant Justice Project.

Before law school, Plata worked at the Institute for Women in Migration in Mexico City where they documented migrant kidnappings occurring as a result of the Migrant Protection Protocols, and pursued a masters in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at the University of Oxford.  

Umer Ranjha ’26 LLM
Bernstein Fellow
UN Special Rapporteur on Judicial Independence, U.S.

Umer A. Ranjha will spend his Bernstein Fellowship year in New York and Geneva, serving as a Legal Associate to Margaret Satterthwaite, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. His academic interests lie in comparative constitutional law, public international law, and judicial accountability. At Yale, he is focusing on institutional design and accountability mechanisms for electoral commissions in the Global South. He is a recipient of the Streicker Fund, through which he conducted research at the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He also serves as an Editor of the Yale Journal of International Law and the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities and will represent Yale at the 2026 Annual Conference of the American Society of International Law.

Prior to Yale, Ranjha clerked for Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah at the Supreme Court of Pakistan for two years, where he assisted in several landmark judgments spanning constitutional law, human rights, and international arbitration. He has been personally acknowledged in over 25 reported judgments for his assistance to the bench. He also practiced at a full-service law firm, where he was part of the litigation team working on constitutional and human rights cases. Ranjha graduated from the University of London in 2022 at the top of his class, earning a World Distinction (the highest academic award) for his dissertation in constitutional law. He has an extensive mooting record, with accolades at the Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition (ranking first orally in the Pakistan national rounds), the Jean-Pictet International Humanitarian Law Competition, and the K.K. Luthra Criminal Law Moot Court Competition.

María José Gutiérrez Rodríguez ’26 LLM
Robina Fellow
Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Costa Rica

María José Gutiérrez Rodríguez will spend her Robina Fellowship year at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) in San José, Costa Rica.

Before coming to Yale, Gutiérrez Rodríguez coordinated a project at the Supreme Court of Justice of Mexico focused on disseminating the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court. The project resulted in an open-access collection of 30 thematic volumes compiling the court’s precedent. The purpose of this project was centered in strengthening access to justice and promoting the domestic implementation of Inter-American human rights standards.

She also worked closely with higher education institutions and law professors in Mexico to advance methodologies for human rights education in law schools. In addition, she co-edited a book on the state of the art of teaching human rights in Latin America, collaborating with professors across the region.

At Yale, she has been most interested in the experiences of victims of human rights violations in their interactions with state authorities. She is particularly interested in the role of the Inter-American Court in providing a forum for victims to seek recognition and redress.

Indy Sobol ’26
Bernstein Fellow
Forest Peoples Programme, Cameroon

Indy Sobol will spend her Bernstein Fellowship year working for the Forest Peoples Programme, where she will collaborate with local partners in the Congo Basin to advance indigenous rights and to protect ancestral land from environmental exploitation. She hopes to use her fellowship year with the organization to learn how environmental advocates can better work alongside environmental justice communities. The Forest Peoples Programme is an NGO that works with partner organizations in the tropical forest belt to help secure rights to traditional lands, territories, and resources and to self-determination through the principle of free, prior and informed consent.

At Yale, Sobol was a member of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and the Environmental Protection Clinic. She served as a Coker Fellow and student director of the Global Constitutionalism Seminar. She also spent the summer of 2024 and the spring of 2025 in the Civil Rights Enforcement Section of the California Department of Justice. Before law school, Sobol received an MPhil in history for her legal history research on the rights of religious minorities in the Cold War.