Eric Lewis (human rights attorney)

Eric L. Lewis is an American human rights attorney, writer, international litigator, and columnist. He is the Chairman of Reprieve US and a senior partner at the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss (LBKM).^[1] Lewis writes regularly for The Independent, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Esquire and other publications on multiple topics including the death penalty, child sexual abuse, torture, the legal profession and various human rights projects.^[2][3][4] He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Lewis received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He later earned an M.Phil. from Cambridge University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar, and his Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Yale Law School,^[5] where he was an Articles and Book Review Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He served as law clerk to the late District of Columbia Circuit Judge David L. Bazelon.

Lewis's legal career is defined by high-stakes international litigation. He is the chair of the law firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss, and Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.^[6] In the 1990s he represented the liquidators of BCCI in what was the largest bank collapse in history. He was also pivotal in cases involving the Madoff investment scandal, Laker Airways, and Carlyle Capital.^[1]

In 2020 Lewis served as an expert on US law for Assange's defense team.^[7][8]

In recent years, Lewis has served counsel to former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. He has represented various sovereigns in multinational negiations and disputes. He also represents leading international charities.

He has lectured Georgetown University Law Center, Oxford University, and Yale.

Lewis is a prominent human rights advocate who has spent over two decades representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay. As the Chairman of Reprieve US, he oversees strategic litigation aimed at abolishing the death penalty and ending indefinite detention without trial.^[9][10]

Lewis served as lead counsel for hunger-striking prisoners at Guantánamo, as well as a civil suit which went twice to the US Supreme Court to hold the Secretary or Defense and generals in the chain of command civilly liable for authorizing torture on a vast scale at Guantanamo.

In 2021 he represented Asadullah Haroon Gul, who became the first Guantánamo detainee in over a decade to successfully win a habeas corpus petition.^[11]

Beyond individual representation, Lewis is a member of the Board of Advisers at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, which is a specialist research centre within the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford.^[12] In this capacity, he provides practitioner-led strategic guidance to the institute's academic initiatives.

Lewis utilizes his prominence in major media outlets, to translate complex legal issues surrounding the "War on Terror" into public discourse. By providing consistent commentary on legal ethics and human rights, he has become a visible voice for institutional accountability and the rule of law.

In a series of opinion pieces for The Independent, such as "What good is America's constitution if Guantánamo Bay still exists?", Lewis characterises the prison as a place of 'legal darkness' where justice has been suspended for nearly two decades. Lewis often highlights the disparity between the U.S. government's domestic adherence to the Bill of Rights and its 'legal gymnastics' abroad. Lewis has consistently uses his columns to strip away the sanitised language of the military. He described Guantánamo not as a secure facility, but as a "Potemkin prison".

Lewis is often categorised as a journalist due to his extensive and regular editorial output. He is a columnist for The Independent's "Voices" section.^[13] His columns typically critique the "Global War on Terror," the use of the death penalty, and the intersection of American politics and judicial ethics. His work also appears in The New York Times,^[1] The New Yorker,^[14] Esquire, and The New York Law Journal. He is the author of Leaving Guantanamo: How One Country Brought Its Men Home from the Forever Prison (2026).^[15]