Gutierrez, Gitanjali

Position

Staff Attorney, GGJI

Biography

Gitanjali S. Gutierrez is an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a New York-based human rights organization litigating extensive challenges to the Executive’s post-9/11 anti-terrorism policies. Ms. Gutierrez’s work focuses on challenges to unlawful detention and torture, national security issues, and anti-terrorism practices.  Ms. Gutierrez was a member of the legal team representing the Guantánamo detainees in Rasul v. Bush before the United States Supreme Court in 2004 and is part of the legal team litigating the Boumediene v. Bush appeal currently pending before the Supreme Court.  Following CCR’s 2004 victory in Rasul, she conducted the first visit by a habeas attorney to Guantánamo in September 2004.  Since that time, she has been meeting frequently at the military prison with clients from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Palestine, Syria, and the Sudan .  Ms. Gutierrez is counsel for Mohammed al Qahtani, a Saudi citizen detained in Guantánamo, who was subjected to the “first special interrogation plan,” a regime of torture and inhuman treatment authorized by the Secretary of Defense.  She also represents Majid Khan, a Baltimore resident and citizen of Pakistan transferred from secret CIA detention to imprisonment at Guantánamo in September 2006. Gitanjali graduated magna cum laude from Cornell Law School and was a Managing Editor for the Cornell Law Review.  Following graduation, she clerked for the Honorable Guido Calabresi, United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, taught International Human Rights Law and Terrorism at Cornell Law School, and served as a Gibbons Fellow in Public Interest and Constitutional Law at Gibbons, P.C.