Staff
Dr. Terri Marsh
Executive Director
Dr. Terri Marsh is the Executive Director and Senior Litigation partner of the Human Rights Law Foundation, which she launched in 2005. She coordinates and manages the legal and policy work of the Foundation, filing and consulting in human rights cases in the US and abroad on behalf of dissidents and persecuted groups from China, advocating for dissidents in China through human rights reports and projects. Dr. Marsh currently represents plaintiffs in a groundbreaking lawsuit against Cisco Systems for aiding and abetting torture and other human rights violations by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through design and maintenance of a surveillance system in China called “The Golden Shield”. In 2002, Dr. Marsh filed a landmark case against former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chair, Jiang Zemin, and the Gestapo-like Office 610. In 2003, she filed a case against then-mayor of Beijing, Liu Qi in collaboration with CJA, and in 2004, she filed a landmark case for human rights violations against a CCP propagandist.
She holds a Ph.D. in Classics from SUNY and a J.D. from New York University School of Law. Following law school, she worked as a consultant for the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign, for the Legal Defense and Education Fund of the National Organization for Women, the Center for Law and Social Policy, and as the Director of a D.C. Superior Court Diversion Court for juvenile offenders in Washington D.C. She is an active member of the D.C. State Bar and of the federal bars of the Illinois and the District of Columbia, the bars of the First Circuit, Second Circuit, Seventh Circuit, and Supreme Court of the United States of America. She serves on the board of several China related organizations.
Dr. Terri Marsh taught for over a decade Greek political theory and moral philosophy and conscience, Socrates, and women’s studies at the University of California at San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin and Wake Forest University. Her study of the Classical Greek historian Thucydides led her to become an international human rights lawyer.
She is the author of numerous professional articles and presentations on Western moral philosophy, including “Conversations with Sappho” from LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory; “The (Other) Maiden’s Tale,” in Representation in Ancient Greece & Rome, Oxford University Press; “The Semiotics of Self in Sapphic Verse,” Southeastern Classical Association, North Carolina; and “The Construction of Rationality in Classical Greek Philosophy,” Southeast Classical Association, Tampa Florida. She is also the author of numerous works on the state of human rights and law in China: “A Rule by Law?” Congressional-Executive Commission on China; “Nuremberg Re-Visited,” Canadian Bar Association Annual Conference, Winnipeg Canada; “The Non-immunity of Former Heads of State for Crimes against Humanity,” Searching for Justice: One-day Forum in Advance of UN International Day, Montreal Canada. She has delivered papers at International Law conferences and chaired a 2010 panel at Harvard Law School, “Seeking Corporate Responsibility/Human Rights: Everyone’s Business.”
Carlos Iglesias
Director (Europe)
Biography forthcoming.
Yiyang Xia
Senior Director of Research and Policy (China)
Biography forthcoming.
Matthew Griechen
Staff Attorney
Matthew Griechen joined HRLF as a Staff Attorney in August 2021. Mr. Griechen works on HRLF’s litigation seeking accountability for human rights abuses.
Mr. Griechen came to HRLF from Reprieve U.S., where he worked to prevent the misuse of medicines in executions and on the representation of men unlawfully detained at Guantanamo Bay. Mr. Griechen holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Columbia University.
Former Staff
Brian Pierce
Connie Smead Fellow (September 2010 – August 2012); Litigation Coordinator (September 2013 – May 2016)
Brian Pierce received his law degree in May 2010 from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was on the Dean’s List and served as an Articles Editor at the Georgetown Journal of International Law, one of the most prominent international law journals in the nation. While at Georgetown, Mr. Pierce studied in London as part of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies, a program that gathers students and professors from around the world to focus on issues of international law.
Mr. Pierce previously worked at HRLF as an intern and extern in 2008 and 2009. Based on his excellent performance, he was offered a Connie Smead Fellowship and joined HRLF in the fall of 2010.
As a Connie Smead Fellow and later Litigation Coordinator, Mr. Pierce worked extensively on Doe v. Cisco Systems, Inc., filed in May of 2011, and Zhang v. CACWA.
Mr. Pierce earned his undergraduate degree in Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a member of the Illinois State Bar and is pending admission to the D.C. Bar.
Jordan Berman
Connie Smead Fellow (September 2012 – May 2014)
Jordan Berman received his B.A. from Brandeis University and his J.D. from UCLA. He was Managing Editor of the UCLA Law Review, where he published a note on domestic criminal law. He served as a Temporary Political Officer at the US Embassy in Athens, Greece, and on a prosecution team at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the Netherlands. At the Tribunal, he drafted motions, prepared evidence, wrote portions of closing arguments and briefs including in the case of Dragomir Milosevic, who was sentenced to 33 years imprisonment for crimes against humanity and of a violation of the laws or customs of war.
From 2008 to 2010, Mr. Berman was a Staff Law Clerk for the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, where he wrote published opinions and orders in concert with appellate judges in almost every field of federal law, reviewed habeas cases and assisted the Circuit court in other capacities.
Mr. Berman lived abroad in Israel where he authored the book “Best Practices for Human Rights and Humanitarian NGO Fact-Finding” (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, 2012), and then in India where he wrote a handbook on prosecuting caste-based hate crimes with the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights.
At HRLF, Mr. Berman served as lead counsel for an asylum appeal to US Court of Appeals based on international human rights concerns, as co-counsel for human rights litigation against a US company for violations of international law under Alien Tort Statute, and authored memoranda and briefs for several international universal jurisdiction cases that HRLF has filed with HRLF partners in Europe and S. America.
He is a member of the Illinois State Bar and the bars of the First Circuit, Seventh Circuit, and the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
Ryan Mitchell
Harvard Law Fellow (September 2012 – August 2013); Staff Attorney (September 2013 – July 2014)
Ryan Mitchell received the Harvard Kaufman Public Interest Fellowship for his work at HRLF, where he researches international and U.S. law for human rights cases, reviews legal documents on human rights and refugee/asylum issues, and wrote significant portions of complaints in two Alien Tort Statute cases, including the major international human rights litigation Doe v. Cisco. Mr. Mitchell also served as liaison with Chinese lawyers and other legal professionals, and hosted trilingual (English—Mandarin—Spanish) meetings to coordinate international advocacy efforts. He is fluent in Modern Mandarin, Japanese, English, and Spanish, and proficient in reading French and Classical (Literary) Chinese.
Prior to his work at HRLF, Mr. Mitchell served as a research assistant to Harvard Law School Vice Dean William Alford, an expert on China and international law. Under Professor Alford’s guidance, Mr. Mitchell conducted innovative research on early 20th century Sino-Japanese legal history. As a member of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, Mr. Mitchell helped represent clients in two Alien Tort Statute cases by conducting extensive legal and fact-finding research. In one case, he located key evidentiary resources that had significant impact on litigation strategy, and extensively researched Japanese and Spanish-language resources. He also worked alongside a team preparing arguments for strategic consideration in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, then pending appeal for certiorari before the Supreme Court. In 2011, Mr. Mitchell worked in the chambers of Judge Kessler at the Federal District Court for the District of Washington, conducting research for the drafting of opinions in federal False Claims Act cases. He also served as a Board Member and Symposium Chair for the Harvard Human Rights Journal.
Mr. Mitchell has extensive experience as a legal researcher in China. As a Cravath International Fellow in 2012 in Beijing, Changchun, and Harbin, Mr. Mitchell discovered previously unpublished documents about the legal system of Manchukuo (1931-1945). At the Beijing Children’s Legal Aid and Research Center in 2010, Mr. Mitchell researched U.S., Chinese, and international law for children’s and migrant workers’ civil rights protection and Chinese rural land use issues.
Ryan Mitchell’s article “Douzheng: A ‘Legal Performative’ That Destroys Law” is pending publication.
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