Faisal Yamil Meneses

Faisal Yamil Meneses is a Venezuelan lawyer with more than 5 years of professional experience advocating for human rights, rule of law, democracy, peacebuilding and transitional justice. He worked as an attorney at the Law Firm Ayala, Dillon, Fernández & Chavero, where he litigated cases before the Human Rights Systems alongside the former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Professor Carlos Ayala Corao, defended persecuted Venezuelan political leaders, and represented victims from other countries such as Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, México, Perú and Suriname. Faisal was also appointed as National Coordinator for Vulnerable Groups and Individuals of the Presidential Commission for Human Rights of the Interim Government of Venezuela (2020) and Teaching Assistant of Constitutional Law at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (2019-2022). Previous to his position at the Notre Dame Law School Human Rights Clinic, Faisal was a Research Associate at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, where he served as project coordinator of the Notre Dame Design and Compliance Reparations Lab, leading the initiatives on the quantitative and qualitative databases of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Climate Change Reparations Dataset. He is currently a consultant for Venezuelan civil society organizations and Legal Coordinator of the NGO Centro de Justicia y Paz (Cepaz) and the coalition Justicia y Verdad Venezuela, with which he conducts advocacy and litigation before international courts and bodies, including the IACHR, the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, among other intergovernmental organizations and fora.

Faisal earned his Law degree summa cum laude from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas (2020) and holds a Masters of Law degree summa cum laude from Notre Dame Law School in International Human Rights Law (2023). He holds a Diploma on Transitional Justice from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, mention excellent (2021) and was a Fellow of the Lucerne Academy for Human Rights Implementation of the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, where he earned a Diploma on Business and Human Rights rate A+ (2017).

He is fluent in Spanish and English and speaks Portuguese at an intermediate level.