Yavar Hameed

Lawyer / Avocat (he/him)

Ontario Bar 2001 | MA Carleton University (NPSIA) 2001 | LLB University of Ottawa 1999

In my law practice, I focus on empowering clients to understand their rights and offer strategies to help them navigate, simplify, and overcome disempowering and oppressive legal and social challenges.

I aim to be responsive to individual problems within complex structural contexts. My work has involved seeking accountability in cases of police brutality, protecting whistle blowers, defending targets of the so called “War on Terror”, resisting against Anti-Palestinian Racism and advocating for prisoner rights.  Over the last 25 years, I have litigated important cases in these areas, among others, which has helped me to refine my advocacy skills.

I also offer support and advice to community organizations and members of grass roots networks that are being unconstitutionally impeded, targeted, or criminalized. My perspective on movement lawyering is informed by a seminar course that I developed and taught at Carleton University’s Department of Law and Legal Studies for 15 years exploring contemporary and historical human rights problems in Canada with a focus upon the ideological persecution of dissent by the state. My ideas on social justice and the law are captured in a short documentary film I produced in 2020, which looks at the limits of the law in building social change.