Faye Al-Tourah

Faye Al-Tourah is a first-year MPA candidate specializing in Human Rights, Gender, and Equity. She is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned honors in political science, with a minor in law and society. In her undergraduate studies, she developed a focus on women’s rights in her home country, Kuwait. For her senior thesis, she examined the impact of Kuwait’s ratification of the CEDAW in 1994 on attitudes toward women’s rights in Kuwaiti Parliament committees, tracking policy trends in 1993–2023 committee reports. 

Faye served as a research assistant to women’s rights expert and CEDAW Member-Elect Rangita de Silva de Alwis. She supported de Silva de Alwis’s global women’s rights work, playing a key role in CEDAW sessions and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. At the 88th session of the CEDAW, she accompanied de Silva de Alwis to provide policy research and help draft concluding recommendations for states. As part of Kuwait’s review, she collaborated with de Silva de Alwis to advocate successfully for the repeal of Article 153 related to honor killings. Al-Tourah also conducted research on the WPS agenda to inform CEDAW’s policy development, which included mapping the emphasis on women’s leadership across WPS resolutions and compiling a WPS annex.

Aside from her assistantship, she has been engaged in the legal system. Following graduation, she served as a teaching assistant for the Penn Carey Law Global Institute for Human Rights certificate program. She also worked as a legal intern for the Kuwait National Petroleum Company, gaining hands-on exposure to business and petroleum law.

Al-Tourah is an aspiring lawyer and plans to deepen her expertise in corporate law before pursuing a JD-MBA dual degree program.