Benjamin Farley

Benjamin R. Farley is a Visiting (non-resident) Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Human Rights Center, where he focuses on issues related to national security, counterterrorism, international humanitarian law, and international human rights law.

Farley is special counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, where he focuses on wartime and emergency authorities. He joined NILC after thirteen years as a career national security lawyer and policy professional with the U.S. government. He most recently served as the Director of the Office of Terrorist Detentions at the U.S. Department of State, leading U.S. government efforts to repatriate detained and displaced foreign nationals in northeast Syria and contributing to the return of thousands of individuals to their countries of origin. Farley rejoined the State Department in August 2021 after four years as a supervisory trial attorney and law-of-war counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, Military Commissions Defense Organization, where he represented Ammar al Baluchi before the capital 9/11 military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Farley took a leave of absence from the federal government to be a Visiting Professor and the Acting Director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law, where he taught courses on public international law, international humanitarian law, and national security law. He originally joined the Department of State in 2012 as a Presidential Management Fellow, and, from 2013 to 2017, he was a senior adviser to the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure.

Farley is a member of the Executive Board of the American Society of International Law’s Lieber Society. He was a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations from 2019 through 2024. His work has appeared in a variety of law, policy, and popular publications.