Kudrat Dutta Chaudhary Becomes First Immigrant of Indian Origin on San Francisco’s Immigrant Rights Commission
- The Chandigarh-born lawyer will guide the mayor and board of supervisors on issues and policies that impact immigrants who live or work in the region.
Chandigarh-born lawyer Kudrat Dutta Chaudhary has become the first immigrant of Indian origin to be named to the Immigrant Rights Commission for the city and county of San Francisco. Announcing the Dec. 22 swearing-in on her LinkedIn page, Dutta Chaudhary wrote that she is “very excited to be taking this role” and is “really looking forward to working for my community in San Francisco. The Immigrant Rights Commission guides the mayor and board of supervisors on issues and policies that impact immigrants who live or work in San Francisco.
A gender, human rights, child rights, and conflict resolution specialist, Dutta Chaudhary most recently worked as an Asylum Law Clerk: Gender Specialist at the Law Office of Robert B. Jobe. She was also a guest lecturer on Feminism, Patriarchal Violence & Gender in Int’l Law at the Harvard Law School, and heads the women’s march in San Francisco.
She graduated with an LLM from The Fletcher School at Tufts University. There she was involved as a research assistant with Save the Children and Prof. Dyan Mazurana to build a concept note of creating a database for child brides in Humanitarian Settings,” according to her profile on Jobe’s law office.
As one of the founders of a non-violent movement called “Stop the Shame,” Dutta Chaudhary was selected for the ‘Leading Non Violent Movements for Social Progress’ at the Harvard Kennedy School.
She also headed Fletcher Global Women whilst co-directing the Fletcher LEADS- Leadership, Equality and Diversity Program. These initiatives helped bring “gender parity on campus and to promote a culture of discussions on issues like gender violence and its various detrimental effects on women and how they can be solved,” the profile said.
She was also the event chair for the Harvard Law School Negotiators for which she planned and organized training and speaker events on negotiations.
Before joining Fletcher, she worked for Jurisconsultus wherein she dealt with matrimonial cases especially working on women’s rights issues. She served as a consultant for a think tank called Bhajan Global Impact Foundation to help set its organizational priorities at its inception.
A published novelist, her debut novel in 2016, “Laiza: Sometimes the End Is Only a Beginning,” is about human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of women after the Nepal Earthquake of 2015. As one of the founders of a non-violent movement called “Stop the Shame,” Dutta Chaudhary was selected for the ‘Leading Non Violent Movements for Social Progress’ at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She completed her B.A., and LLB from the Army Institute of Law in Mohali, India. She researched women prisoners of Burail Jail to see whether the crimes that were committed by them were committed due to what the rational choice theory supports or if were there situational factors involved.
She is a trained mediator from MWI, Massachusetts and The Australian Disputes Center, Sydney.