Rez Gardi

Rez Gardi is an international lawyer and human rights activist. She was born in a refugee camp in Pakistan as her family escaped Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds. Arriving in New Zealand with nothing, Rez sought to use her difficult start in life as motivation to succeed, becoming New Zealand’s first Kurdish lawyer. She recently graduated as a Fulbright Scholar with a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School. She is the first Kurd in history to graduate from Harvard Law. She is currently working in Iraq building cases for the prosecution of ISIS for their targeted genocidal campaign against the Yezidis, including mass executions, kidnapping, torture, sexual violence, and other egregious human rights abuses. She is the founder of ‘Empower’ – a youth-led organization aiming to address the underrepresentation of refugees in higher education. Through their projects, they empower and enable refugee youth through education, leadership, and capacity-building, so that young refugees can pursue a meaningful future. Through her work, she has reached over 20,000 refugee youth globally. She is a co-founder of the Centre for the Asia Pacific Refugee Studies, an academic institution based at the University of Auckland, which responds to challenges of forced displacement. Rez has a wealth of experience advocating for the rights of refugee at global fora. She was one of the founding members of the Global Youth Advisory Council to the UNHCR and the Global Refugee-led Network. In 2020 she established the Refugee Steering Group for the UNHCR Annual Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement. She also is Co-Managing Director for ‘R-Seat’, a refugee-led initiative seeking to solidify commitments from UNHCR ExCom States to enshrine refugee participation in the global refugee regime.