<span class="vcard">Heather Barr</span>

Heather Barr

Guest Author

Heather Barr (X) is associate director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. She has done research in countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and South Korea on issues including child marriage, girls’ education, violence against women, online gender-based violence, refugee and prisoners’ rights, and human trafficking.

She joined Human Rights Watch in 2011 as the Afghanistan researcher, after working for the United Nations in Afghanistan and Burundi. After law school she litigated for discharge planning for prisoners with psychosocial disabilities in New York City, and founded an alternative-to-incarceration program. Before law school, she worked with homeless women. She is a graduate of London School of Economics, Columbia Law School, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Articles by this author:

In this picture taken on March 5, 2025, Afghan niqab-clad women walk along a street on the outskirts of Kabul. Since the Taliban came back to power in Kabul in August 2021, they have imposed broad restrictions on women based on a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Women have been squeezed out of public life in what the United Nations has labelled "gender apartheid." (Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)
A small class of Afghan female students wearing facemasks attend a class on the first day after their school was reopened, which was earlier closed due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, in Herat on August 22, 2020. They sit socially distanced from each other at desks. A teacher walks around the classroom.

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