We are saddened by the passing of our board member Laila Bokhari on Friday, 12 December 2025. We are grateful to Laila for the years of expertise and principled guidance that she brought to HRHF’s board since joining in 2019. A distinguished political scientist, diplomat, and politician, Laila devoted decades to human rights. We extend our deepest condolences to her family.

Laila Bokhari is a Norwegian political scientist, researcher, and expert in the field of terrorism, as well as a diplomat and politician. Prior to being a Kistefos fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Bokhari served as State Secretary at the Office of the Norwegian Foreign Minister, and as the State Secretary at the Office of the Norwegian Prime Minister before that.

She has also worked as a researcher on security policy, counter-terrorism and religious and political extremism at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (Nupi) and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). Outside Norway, she has been an associate fellow at King’s College London, worked for the OSCE in Warsaw, the Norwegian Refugee Council in Geneva, the Norwegian Afghanistan Committee, the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Pakistan, and as part of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH). She has also worked on counter-terrorism policies for the UN in New York. Bokhari was a member of the 22 July Commission, which was mandated to review and learn from the terrorist attacks on the government complex in Oslo and on Utøya on 22 July 2011. She holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Amsterdam and an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Bokhari has been a member of the board of Human Rights House Foundation since 2019.