On My Side 2024 Awardee
The Advocate of the Year Award honors an individual who has shown extraordinary commitment to advocating for trafficking survivors.This year, we honor Rene Kathawala’s remarkable pro bono work over the last decade. Most recently, Rene led Orrick’s team in publishing a series of legal practice guides for prosecutors and advocates to address the worldwide problem of sexual abuse of children by perpetrators traveling abroad.
Child sexual exploitation in travel and tourism plagues communities across the globe. Accountability for the perpetrators is all too rare. Rene’s leadership in drafting and publishing these guides has given advocates powerful tools to combat the scourge of travelers’ sexual abuse of children. The Orrick guides, co-published with the Human Trafficking Legal Center, focus on holding perpetrators from Australia, France, and Switzerland accountable in their home jurisdictions for extraterritorial crimes. The guides’ impact is real: the guides have been downloaded nearly 1,000 times from our website since publication. And that does not include the thousands of copies we have distributed to partners by PDF over email.
The guides required an enormous investment of legal resources. A large pro bono team, headed by Rene, conducted extensive research into the laws of each foreign jurisdiction. Multiple pro bono attorneys distilled each country’s case law and offered practical guidance for advocates. Rene’s leadership of the Orrick teams led to the successful publication of this invaluable resource, a direct response to the pervasive problem of tourists traveling abroad to sexually exploit children. Thanks to Rene’s leadership and the Orrick pro bono teams’ dedicated work, advocates are better armed in the fight against child sexual abuse in tourism.
Rene’s work with us on the practice guides is just the latest in Orrick’s long history of excellent pro bono work on human trafficking cases. Over the past decade, Rene has successfully led pro bono litigation teams, winning victories in federal court for trafficking survivors. Teams under his supervision have won T visas for survivors to remain safely in the United States. His commitment to pro bono work on behalf of trafficking survivors is both deep and longstanding. We are honored to partner with him, and we are honored to present with the award for the 2024 Advocate of the Year.
About the Awardee
Rene Kathawala serves as Orrick’s firmwide pro bono counsel, responsible for managing and initiating the firm’s pro bono activities, including all administrative and legal aspects.
Rene works with other pro bono counsel and legal services nonprofits to increase the quantity and quality of pro bono representation that is being provided to indigent clients in each of the cities worldwide where Orrick has a presence. In addition, he supervises and directly works on cases in such diverse areas as immigration law, family and matrimonial law, housing law, public benefits law, employment law counseling, impact litigation and nonprofit advice and counseling. Rene has worked on many substantial matters in the federal and state systems over his career that are reported as precedent. He also works with firm attorneys to strengthen the firm’s innovative Impact Finance and Social Enterprise team that he founded and that provides representation in diverse transactional areas to nonprofit, for profit and hybrid organizations dedicated to providing basic services to poor persons around the world in areas including microfinance, water, education, energy, housing and health.
Based on his long-standing commitment to access to justice issues, Rene has been appointed to serve as a member of the New York City Bar Association Right to Counsel Task Force and the New York City Bar Association Family Court Judicial Appointment & Assignment Process Work Group. In recognition of his exemplary work in family law, United States District Judge Bloom appointed Rene as a special master in a federal court family law matter in 2014 in the Eastern District of New York in case number 07-cv-02565-ARR-LB, styled Garmhausen et al v. United States Department of Justice et al.