Marco Simons

Marco Simons "is the Legal Director of EarthRights International (ERI), in Washington, D.C., which focuses on holding corporations and other actors accountable for human rights and environmental abuses. He also spent his Bernstein Fellowship year with ERI, working on litigation and advocacy projects promoting multinational corporate responsibility and accountability for human rights violations. "After his fellowship year, Marco clerked for the Honorable Dorothy Wright Nelson on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California. After his clerkship, he practiced human rights and civil rights law with Hadsell & Stormer in Pasadena, California. With ERI and with Hadsell & Stormer, Marco has been counsel in Doe v. Unocal Corp., a lawsuit seeking to hold oil companies liable for human rights abuses associated with a gas pipeline project in Burma; in 2005, the parties announced a historic settlement providing compensation to the plaintiffs. Marco is currently involved in several other transnational lawsuits through ERI, including Bowoto v. Chevron, involving abuses against oil protestors in Nigeria, which is scheduled for trial in 2008. He has also taught human rights law at Occidental College and American University’s law school. "Marco graduated in 1997 from Harvard College, where he received a joint degree in environmental science and archaeology, and graduated from Yale Law School in 2001. While at Yale, Marco served as a student director of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Project, a student-run organization; he also worked for a semester with the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, with which he traveled to Kenya to assist in researching and writing Spare the Child, a Human Rights Watch report on corporal punishment in Kenyan schools."