Jennifer Daskal

Who is Jennifer Daskal?

Jennifer Daskal is an American lawyer who serves as senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, and focuses on issues of terrorism, criminal law and immigration. She is also currently a political hire at the Department of Justice, which is seeking to prosecute terror suspects through the criminal justice system instead of through military tribunals.

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Cambridge and Brown University and a Marshall Scholar, Daskal garnered attention after traveling to the countries to which Guantanamo captives have been released, to verify that those countries are abiding by the undertakings they made to the US Government to respect the returned captives' human rights.

On February 23, 2010, the New York Post reported that Daskal, Neal Katyal, and three other lawyers who had worked on behalf of the civil rights of Guantanamo captives, had been serving on the Obama administration's task force reviewing the status of the remaining Guantanamo captives. The paper had first questioned her appointment to the Department of Justice's National Security Division, in July 2009, and then again in January 2010.