Meet the Team.
John Doughty
Founding Member
John was a safeguarding lawyer for ten years before shifting his focus to working with children, survivors of SGBV, and migrant communities on access to justice in transitional or conflict-affected contexts. He is particularly interested in working with plural justice systems, adopting restorative and transformative approaches, and using a people-centered lens to justice.
John has provided technical support to a range of civil society organisations in South-East Asia, East and Southern Africa, and the Middle East with a focus on justice and security for communities impacted by conflict.
John has led large-scale research projects, designed, implemented, and evaluated access to justice and legal empowerment programmes, and provided technical support and capacity building to a variety of justice actors.
Kara Wong
Founding Member
A peace practitioner, instructional designer, and action researcher Kara’s expertise sits at the intersection of peacebuildling, social change and learning.
For the past two decades Kara has worked with UN agencies, grassroots and International NGOS, academic institutions, multi-donor trust funds and activist-led networks, facilitating education-focused responses to complex social issues, with a focus on communities impacted by conflict.
With formal training in both human rights and experiential learning Kara’s current works focuses on designing participatory research processes that elevate local knowledge, and innovative learning programs and materials that support personal and systems level change.
Karim El Mufti
Founding Member
Professor and senior researcher in political science and international law with a specialization in human rights. Karim pioneered Clinical Legal Education in Lebanon through the co-founding of a one-in-a-kind Human Rights Legal Clinic at the Law Faculty of La Sagesse University, which he directed for more than 14 years, before moving to Paris in 2021.
As an academic, Karim teaches today at Sciences Po Paris and the Saint-Joseph University in Beirut. Karim holds a strong record of publications and studies on access to justice based on extensive fieldwork and research in Lebanon and other Arab and Balkans countries.
With 20 years of experience in strategic and legal analysis, Karim's research interests revolve around the issues of rule of law, informal, transitional and international justice, as well as protection of vulnerable groups (migrants, refugees, stateless, children).
Shaun Butta
Founding Member
Shaun Butta is an access to justice expert with a focus on housing land and property rights and climate justice with a special interest in access to HLP justice for conflict affected and displaced populations.
Shaun has worked across Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia for a variety of UN agencies and international NGOs, providing research, programmatic advice and advocacy on the issues of legal aid, restitution and compensation, legal reform and customary land administration systems.
Shaun holds BA, Master of International Studies and Juris Doctor degrees and is qualified to practice law in Australia.
Shaun is currently pro bono legal advisor to the Peace Coalition Ukraine which is a consortium of actors designing a restitution and compensation mechanism for rebuilding destroyed villages in Ukraine.