February 28, 2005

Dr. Muhamad Mugraby

Biography

A human rights defender and democracy advocate, Dr. Mugraby is also a lawyer with an international practice based in Beirut. He is a former lecturer on civil rights, legal philosophy and private international law at the Lebanese University Law School. He was educated in Beirut, at the Lebanese University Law School and the American University, and in New York at Columbia University Law School where he received several fellowships and graduate degrees, including the degree of Doctor of Juridical Science ("JSD"). He is a 1997 human rights awardee of Human Rights Watch, New York, for his defense of human rights in Lebanon.

For many decades, Dr. Mugraby has strongly called for the establishment of modern independent judicial systems in Lebanon and the Middle East, characterized with independence and integrity, as a necessary precondition for the rule of law, democracy and modernity.

As a result of his defense of dozens of prisoners of conscience in high profile cases, and his public criticism of the regime, the government attempted repeatedly to prosecute him in a total of twelve cases. He has successfully defeated two of them and ten are still pending. In August 2003 he was arrested and detained for three weeks which provoked a national and international uproar that led to his release. On February 26, 2005, he was arrested on charges of "assaulting the standing of the state" and held for ten hours for interrogation on the subject of a testimony on Lebanon he gave on November 4, 2003, before the Mashrek Committee of the European Parliament in Brussels, but was released after a standoff in which he rejected the right of the police to question him on that subject. An attempt in early 2004 to prosecute him on the same charges had collapsed in the face of strong protests by the European Commission.

Dr. Mugraby has lectured extensively and contributed numerous articles on the rule of law and the constitution, human rights, and democracy, in Arabic and in English. His books include "Lebanon First" in Arabic, "Permanent Sovereignty over Oil Resources" in English and Arabic, and "The Right Path Does Not Distress Me", recently released in Arabic. A new book in Arabic titled: "My Lebanon" is being printed and is due to be released very soon.

He is the chairman/President and one of the founders of MIRSAD, a human rights organization in Beirut, Campaign for Judicial Integrity, a citizens' group of lawyers and laymen with an agenda for reform in the judiciary and the legal profession, Liberty House, a civil society resources center, and the Center for Democracy and the Rule of Law.

Dr. Mugraby is a native of Beirut. He is 66 years old. He is married to Dalal Macki Mugraby, a professor of interior design at the Lebanese University at Beirut. Dr. and Mrs. Mugraby have two children, Ziad, an information technology expert and an economics graduate of Cornell University, and Suha, a social sciences graduate of the American University of Beirut and a social sciences researcher.