Sabrina Mahtani
Sabrina Mahtani
Sabrina Mahtani is a British Zambian international human rights lawyer with over two decades of experience advancing access to justice for women.
She has worked with multiple nonprofit and intergovernmental agencies, including Amnesty International, the Clooney Foundation for Justice, The Elders, IPPF and the UN, and is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford. She has received an Echoing Green Fellowship, the Harvard Law School Wasserstein Fellowship, Churchill Fellowship and Rockefeller Bellagio Fellowship. She was listed as a Legal Changemaker by Red Magazine, Next Hundred Years and the Institute for African Women In Law. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the position of UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
She founded Women Beyond Walls, a global collaborative that advocates locally and globally to address the mass incarceration of women. This has led to pioneering research on the lack of funding for work with and for incarcerated women and girls and in March 2025, in partnership with Penal Reform International, they released the first global report on laws that criminalise women for reasons rooted in poverty, as covered in The Guardian.
She co-founded AdvocAid, an award-winning NGO in Sierra Leone that provides free legal services for women in detention. Their work contributed to the freeing of six women on death row, abolition of the death penalty and groundbreaking strategic litigation.
She speaks and writes for a variety of media platforms, such as The Guardian, Al Jazeera, BBC, gal-dem, Ms Magazine and African Arguments. She regularly speaks at international fora on how to improve justice outcomes for women and girls – from the UN Commission on the Status of Women to the Reykjavik Global Forum.
She is the recipient of a London Writers Award, SKY Arts RSL Writers Award and The London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She is an alumnus of the Rosemary’s House Writers Retreat.
The Women Beyond Walls podcast was shortlisted for The Webby Awards and an International Women’s Podcast Award.