Emma Playfair is a British human rights lawyer by training. After practicing law in the City of London, she spent ten years working on human rights in the Middle East, initially as a researcher with the first Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq, in the West Bank, and then establishing the human rights program in the Ford Foundation’s Cairo Office.  In 1993 she became Executive Director of INTERIGHTS, the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights, in London, UK, returning to Cairo nine years later to rejoin the Ford Foundation as Regional Representative for the Middle East and North Africa, a position she held until April 2008. She has written on human rights and humanitarian law, and on philanthropy. Amongst other publications, she edited International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).