Contact Us

Amol Mehra, Esq.
Director
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Amol Mehra, Esq. is the Director of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, a coalition of leading human rights, development, labor and environmental organizations working to ensure businesses respect human rights in their global operations. Amol is an international human rights lawyer by training, focusing on business and human rights and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Amol has worked to build accountability frameworks in both domestic and international arenas, including over private military and security companies, around supply chains and extractives industries, and has worked to strengthen measures related to non-financial disclosure, anti-corruption and due diligence regimes. Amol received his Juris Doctor Degree with an Honors Certificate in International and Comparative Law from the University of San Francisco School of Law, and also holds a Bachelor of Commerce with a concentration in Global Strategic Management and the Social Context of Business from McGill University. In addition to his work as Director of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, Amol serves on the Advisory Council for the American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights, is a Coordinating Member and Thematic Specialist for Amnesty International USA, an Advisory Board Member of Lawyers for Better Business (L4BB), and on the Advisory Council for the Ranking Digital Rights Project. Amol writes for the Huffington Post, Forbes Corporate Social Responsibility and Leadership, CSRWire and the Guardian Sustainable Business Section. He is fluent in French and conversant in Hindi.

Katie Shay, Esq.
Legal and Policy Coordinator
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Katie Shay is an international human rights lawyer, admitted to practice in the state of New York. She currently serves as Legal and Policy Coordinator at the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR), leading ICAR's work on judicial remedy and criminal liability for corporate involvement in human rights violations. This includes heading the Access to Judicial Remedy Project, a collaboration with the European Coalition for Corporate Justice and the Corporate Responsibility Coalition; the Nationwide Law School Partnership Project, in collaboration with EarthRights International; and the Commerce, Crime, and Human Rights Project, in collaboration with Amnesty International. In addition, Katie coordinates ICAR's efforts to address corporate accountability cases. Katie graduated from Georgetown University Law School, where she served as managing editor of the Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, President of Georgetown Law’s Amnesty International chapter, and co-chair of the law school’s committee on Human Rights Fact Finding. She was also a student attorney with the Institute for Public Representation, where she worked both with indigenous communities seeking to protect their land from environmental harm and with non-profit organizations petitioning the U.S. government to impose new emissions limits on coal-fired power plants. Katie is a co-author of Sent “Home” with Nothing: The Deportation of Jamaicans with Mental Disabilities, a report that examines human rights implications of U.S. deportation policy. Katie has previously worked at EarthRights International; the law firm of Meyer, Glitzenstein and Crystal; and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. She holds a B.A. from Marquette University. Outside of her work experience, Katie blogs about contemporary business and human rights issues on the Huffington Post and her work has been featured in various other publications. She serves as Vice-Chair of the ABA International Human Rights Committee.

Sara Blackwell, Esq.
Legal and Policy Associate
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Sara Blackwell is an international human rights lawyer, admitted to practice in the state of New York. She currently serves as the Legal and Policy Associate at the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR), where she leads ICAR’s work developing guidance on implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, including through the development of National Action Plans on business and human rights. In this role, Sara co-authored ICAR's joint report with the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR), entitled National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights: A Toolkit for the Development, Implementation, and Review of State Commitments to Business and Human Rights Frameworks. In addition, Sara coordinates ICAR's work on the incorporation of human rights considerations into public procurement practices. She also serves on the ABA Center for Human Right's Working Group on Policy within the Business and Human Rights Project. Sara is a 2013 graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, where she served as a Human Rights Institute Associate, a Public Interest Fellow, a Senior Legal Research and Writing Fellow, Managing Editor of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy, and a leader within the Georgetown human rights community. She also served as a Student Attorney with the law school's International Women's Human Rights Clinic, advocating for the protection of reproductive rights in Uganda. Sara has previously worked with the Fair Labor Association (FLA), EarthRights International (ERI), the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), and Green Advocates International in Liberia. Prior to attending law school, Sara served for over two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia, where she lived and worked with rural agrarian communities to enhance food security and improve natural resource management. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science and human rights from Barnard College of Columbia University, where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She is proficient in Bemba, a Bantu language spoken primarily in northern Zambia, and conversant in Swahili.

Arianis Alvarez
Office Assistant
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Arianis Alvarez received a BA in International Studies with an emphasis in Comparative Cultural Studies and Spanish with a minor in Political Science from Susquehanna University in 2014. While pursuing her undergraduate degree she participated in a European Union simulation in Washington, DC as a member of the EU Parliament reviewing and making recommendations regarding socio-economic policies. Arianis also spent time volunteering with the International YMCA doing fieldwork in Peru and Senegal. While in Peru she worked on community development projects alongside locals supporting town infrastructures. In Senegal, Arianis participated in an agricultural development program geared toward young entrepreneurs. She completed a Political Science thesis comparing Gender Wage Gap Inequality between the European Union and the United States, as well as, a thesis in Spanish pertaining to Simón Bolívar’s vision of a Latin American Union and its comparison to the formation of the modern day European Union. Arianis hopes to further her career path in International Education and Higher Education Policy.

Nicole Vander Meulen
Legal and Policy Intern
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Nicole Vander Meulen is a law student at Georgetown University Law Center and will graduate in May 2015. Prior to attending law school, Nicole received a dual degree in International Development Studies and Political Science and a minor in Spanish from Calvin College. During her undergraduate studies, Nicole spent a semester in Thailand with the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (ISDSI), living with local communities and studying the environmental and human rights impacts of large-scale projects such as dams and the creation of national parks. Last summer, Nicole was an intern with Society for a Democratic Initiative, a local civil society organization in Freetown, Sierra Leone. While there, she participated in an evaluation of government procurement practices in relation to the construction of schools for the World Bank’s Education for All: Fast Track Initiative program. She has also interned with the Justice Defenders Program, an arm of the American Bar Association – Center for Human Rights, where she provided legal assistance to human rights defenders abroad facing prosecution. After graduating from law school, Nicole hopes to work for a non-profit that focuses on reduction of corporate perpetration of or complicity in human rights abuses and environmental degradation abroad.

Grant Berg
Legal and Policy Intern
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Grant Berg is a second-year law student at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC. Grant received a BA in Political Science from California Lutheran University in 2010, where he also minored in ethnic studies and music. While finishing his undergraduate degree, Grant spent a summer in Brussels with the organization TRIALOG, working on development and human rights issues in the European Union. Following graduation, Grant interned for three months with a Grameen-replicator microfinance bank in Jodhpur, India. During his stay in India, he helped research and write a training manual for new loan officers and participated in field visits to borrowers’ villages. He spent part of 2011 working with the Boulder, Colorado non-profit BeadforLife before becoming certified to teach English as a second language. Grant taught English at all levels in Turkey and Poland for one year each, and his experiences working abroad sparked a strong interest in international law. He is now studying international law and business and hopes to pursue a career focused on the intersection of these topics with human rights, ideally in international tort litigation or governmental regulation.