Nina Shea
Nina Shea is an international human-rights lawyer and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, where she directs the Center for Religious Freedom. For the ten years prior to joining Hudson, she worked at Freedom House, where she directed its Center for Religious Freedom. Since 1999, she has served as a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. She has also been appointed as a U.S. delegate to the United Nation's main human rights body by both Republican and Democratic administrations. For over a decade, she has worked extensively for the advancement of individual religious freedom and other human rights in U.S. foreign policy. For seven years ending in 2005, she helped organize and lead a coalition of churches and religious groups that worked to end a religious war against non-Muslims and dissident Muslims in southern Sudan. In 2004 and 2005, she helped advise in the drafting of the Iraqi constitution's religious freedom provision and she authored and edited two widely-acclaimed reports which translated and analyzed Saudi governmental publications that teach hatred and violence against the religious "other." Her 1997 book on anti-Christian persecution, In the Lion's Den, remains a standard in the field.