Alfred Lahai Gbabai Brownell Sr

Alfred Lahai Gbabai Brownell Sr is an internationally recognized environmental rights activist,  lawyer, and Law professor.  He is from Liberia. He is a  former Tom & Andi Bernstein Visiting Human Rights Fellow at the Yale Law School and previously served as an Associate Research Professor and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Northeastern University School of Law.  He is currently the President of Global Climate Legal Defense ( CLiDeF) and a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University School of Law.   For more than two decades, Brownell has advocated to protect the environment and human rights in West Africa and to empower Liberians and West Africans victimized by resource exploitation. While in Liberia, he co-founded and headed the public interest law non-governmental environmental rights organization Green Advocates International and co-established the Alliance for Rural Democracy (ARD), the Natural Resources Women platform, and The Mano River Union Civil Society Natural Resources Rights and Governance Platform. While in exile in the US, he helped establish the Environmental Rights Legal Framework Coalition for Africa ( ERA- Africa), which is campaigning for the promulgation and replication of an Escazu-like agreement in Africa, and the African Climate Platform( ACP), which is a coalition of public interest lawyers and climate activists researching and drafting a petition seeking an advisory opinion from the African Court on the human rights obligations of African Governments to respond to the Climate Crisis. In 2019, Brownell won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for his work protecting tropical forests in Liberia from development by palm oil companies.