November 3, 2023
Agnieszka Fryszman, chair of Cohen Milstein’s Human Rights practice, has been named the 2023 Honorary Fellow for Penn Carey Law’s Public Interest Week (October 30 – November 3, 2023). The event brings together annually lawyers from the international public interest community to connect with faculty, students, and alumni.
As Honorary Fellow, Fryszman has been invited to deliver a keynote address at the Public Interest Student & Alumni Dinner on November 3, concluding the 2023 Public Interest Week. She will also meet with small groups of Penn Carey Law students during her visit.
Recognized as one of the world’s preeminent human rights lawyers, Fryszman has received some of the highest professional honors and accolades, including being named to the Forbes 50 Over 50 (2023) and receiving the Human Trafficking Legal Center’s Human Trafficking Advocate of the Year Award (2020).
Most recently, she represented eleven villagers from Aceh, Indonesia who suffered horrific human rights abuses at the hands of Indonesian soldiers contracted by ExxonMobil to guard its oil operations in the region. After 20 years of litigation involving novel issues of foreign policy, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and choice of law, the case settled one week before jury trial in May 2023 and months after the court largely denied ExxonMobil’s motion for summary judgment, finding most of it “entirely meritless.”
For more than two decades, Fryszman’s work has positively impacted survivors of Nazi-era forced and slave labor against profiteering German and Austrian companies; “comfort women,” i.e., women and girls trafficked into sexual slavery by the government of Japan during World War II; victims of the September 11 attack on the Pentagon; families of men who were lured across borders with promises of well-paying jobs at hotels, but were instead imprisoned and forced to work against their will at a U.S. military base in Iraq, among others.
Learn more about Penn Carey Law’s 2023 Public Interest Week.