Saida Kouzzi, an attorney and women's rights activist from Ouezzane, has been with Global Right's Morocco program since its creation in the spring of 2000.  Now, as the Maghreb Regional Legal Officer, she helped establish the Global Rights Morocco program by participating in a needs assessment with local NGOs, hiring local staff, opening the Rabat office, and designing a program to promote and protect women’s human rights in Morocco.  

 

Ms. Kouzzi’s work involves the design and implementation of programs in collaboration with local NGOs to enhance knowledge of legal and human rights among illiterate and semi-literate women, develop the capacities of NGOs in underserved areas to advocate on  behalf of women’s human rights, promote and protect the human rights of girls and young women at risk, increase local NGOs’ access to information and use of the Internet as an advocacy tool, and advocating on behalf of Moroccan women at international fora. 

 

She designs and conducts trainings on women’s human rights issues and institutional development strategies, and facilitates Working Groups of local NGO representatives.  She designs and co-authors the Morocco Field Office Arabic language publications, which include a Human Rights Education Program Manual, a Resource Book on Empowering Girls and Young Women at Risk, and a Guide to Generating Support from the Private Sector.  She trained over 100 members of local Moroccan NGOs on women’s human rights facilitation, and designed and coordinated a National Month of Awareness on Girls and Young Women at Risk in over 20 sites across the country in March 2003. 

 

Ms. Kouzzi has advocated on behalf of Moroccan women during several sessions of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, in which she also co-led a delegation for Global Rights Advocacy Bridge Program.  She has represented the Law Group Morocco office in regional fora in Cairo and in Amman.  She also supervises the five Global Rights Morocco Community Liaisons in our partner organizations across the country.

 

In 2003, Ms. Kouzzi was instrumental in the design and expansion of the Morocco program into a Maghreb-wide program that works with local NGOs in Algeria and Tunisia to conduct community mobilization with illiterate women, and to promote strategic lawyering by Algerian and Tunisian lawyers through the use of international human rights standards in domestic litigation.   

 

Prior to joining the Global Rights Morocco team, Ms. Kouzzi worked for five years as a juriste at one of Morocco’s most reputed human rights law offices, where she was responsible for case intake and management, legal research, and writing and filing of court complaints, particularly with cases treating women and family law. She was the President and Founder of l'Espace de la femme pour la solidarite et le développement, a Rabat-based NGO addressing women's development.

 

Ms. Kouzzi was an active member of the Association marocaine des droits humains (AMDH), one of Morocco’s largest and most well-known human rights NGOs, for over ten years, during which she served on the Human Rights Violations Central Committee, as General Secretary and Vice Treasurer of the Rabat section, and on the Women’s Human Rights Central Committee. She was also an active member of the National Moroccan Students Union, the Rabat section of the National Association of the Unemployed Graduates, and the Treasurer of the Network to Develop the Capacities of Women Activists in Morocco. Ms. Kouzzi has written on the Plan d'action pour l'integration de la femme au développement and other women’s rights issues in Morocco and has participated in several African fora on women's rights. She earned her law degree from Mohammed V University in Rabat, where she wrote her thesis on political Islam in the Sudan. She is fluent in Arabic, French and English.