Nina Shea

Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Religious Freedom

Nina Shea

At A Glance:

Nina Shea is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute.

Biography

Nina Shea is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute. Ms. Shea has been a human rights lawyer for over 30 years. She works extensively for the advancement of individual religious freedom and other human rights in US foreign policy as it confronts an ascendant Islamic extremism, and other authoritarian regimes. She advocates in defense of those persecuted for their religious beliefs and identities and on behalf of diplomatic measures to end religious repression and violence abroad, whether from state actors or extremist groups.

Ms. Shea was appointed by the US House of Representatives to serve as a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom seven times from 1999 to 2012. During the Soviet era, Ms. Shea’s first client before the United Nations was Soviet Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov. Since then, she has been appointed as a US delegate to the United Nation's main human rights body by both Republican and Democratic administrations. She also served as a member of the Clinton administration's Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. In 2009, she was appointed to serve as a member of the US National Commission to UNESCO.

Ms. Shea played a leading role in building grassroot support for the adoption of the International Religious Freedom Act (1998). For seven years ending in 2005, she helped organize and lead a coalition of churches and religious groups that worked to end a religious war against non-Muslims and dissident Muslims in southern Sudan. In 2014, she initiated and helped lead a coalition of hundreds of prominent American religious leaders to issue The Pledge of Solidarity for Persecuted Iraqi, Syrian and Egyptian Christians and Other Minorities, which was released by a bipartisan congressional panel on May 7, 2014. In summer 2014, she met with Pope Francis to discuss the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.

At Hudson, she has organized conferences for Nigerian schoolgirls and others who survived Boko Haram attacks, Christian converts formerly imprisoned in Iran, Coptic bishops from Egypt, Catholic bishops from China and the Gulf, Muslim scholars, and many others. Ms. Shea advocates on behalf of a broad range of persecuted religious minorities around the world. For such work, she was honored by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA with the Community's inaugural "Ahmadiyya Muslim Humanitarian Award."

She has authored or edited four widely-acclaimed reports on Saudi state educational materials that promote extremist views and in 2011 had an opportunity to travel to Saudi Arabia and speak directly about her findings with the ministers of Education, Justice and Islamic Affairs. Her reports include: Ten Years On: Saudi Arabia's Textbooks Still Promote Religious Violence (2011), Update: Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance (2008), Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance (2006), and Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques (2005), all of which translated and analyzed Saudi governmental publications that teach hatred and violence against the religious "other."

She is the co-author of Silenced: How Apostasy & Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide, with a foreword by Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid, the former President of Indonesia and head of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world's largest Muslim organization (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her most recent book, which she also co-authored, is Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2013). She regularly presents testimony before Congress, delivers public lectures, organizes briefings and conferences, and writes frequently on religious freedom issues in leading publications. 

For the ten years prior to joining Hudson, Ms. Shea worked at Freedom House, where she directed the Center for Religious Freedom, an entity which she had helped found in 1986 as the Puebla Institute.

Ms. Shea is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia. She is a graduate of Smith College, and American University's Washington College of Law.

Events
15
November 2024
Past Event
Martyrs of Communism
Featured Speakers:
Salvatore J. Cordileone
Nina Shea
George Weigel
Marco Novoa
Helen Aguirre Ferre
Moderator:
Maggie Gallagher
Members of the organization Mothers of April hold portraits of their late loved ones outside the Cathedral in Managua on February 23, 2020. (Inti Ocon/AFP via Getty Images)
15
November 2024
Past Event
Martyrs of Communism

A panel of experts will examine common ideology and practices of the repression of churches in China and Latin America.

Members of the organization Mothers of April hold portraits of their late loved ones outside the Cathedral in Managua on February 23, 2020. (Inti Ocon/AFP via Getty Images)
Featured Speakers:
Salvatore J. Cordileone
Nina Shea
George Weigel
Marco Novoa
Helen Aguirre Ferre
Moderator:
Maggie Gallagher
18
September 2024
Past Event
Religion in the Crossfire between Russia and Ukraine
Featured Speakers:
Nina Shea
Oleksandr Aliksiichuk
Dr. Maksym Vasin
Lauren Homer
Pavlo Unguryan
Dmitry Bodyu
Dr. Katharyn Hanson
Construction workers climb onto the roof of a destroyed church on January 4, 2023, in the village of Bohorodychne, Donetsk region. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
18
September 2024
Past Event
Religion in the Crossfire between Russia and Ukraine

An expert discussion about a recent Ukrainian law that seeks to thwart the Kremlin-backed Russian Orthodox Church’s influence.

Construction workers climb onto the roof of a destroyed church on January 4, 2023, in the village of Bohorodychne, Donetsk region. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
Featured Speakers:
Nina Shea
Oleksandr Aliksiichuk
Dr. Maksym Vasin
Lauren Homer
Pavlo Unguryan
Dmitry Bodyu
Dr. Katharyn Hanson
17
July 2024
Past Event
China’s Persecution of Falun Gong at 25 Years
Featured Speakers:
Miles Yu
Dr. Larry Liu
Sarah Cook
Simon Zhang
Levi Browde
Ying Chen
Moderators:
Nina Shea
Cynthia Sun
A Falun Gong demonstrator sits in a cage in London, United Kingdom, on July 18, 2021, during the protest against the Chinese government's persecution. (Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
17
July 2024
Past Event
China’s Persecution of Falun Gong at 25 Years

Join Hudson Institute as expert panels take stock of the Falun Gong crackdown over the past quarter of a century.

A Falun Gong demonstrator sits in a cage in London, United Kingdom, on July 18, 2021, during the protest against the Chinese government's persecution. (Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Featured Speakers:
Miles Yu
Dr. Larry Liu
Sarah Cook
Simon Zhang
Levi Browde
Ying Chen
Moderators:
Nina Shea
Cynthia Sun
13
February 2024
Past Event
The Repression of Hong Kong and Heroism of Jimmy Lai
Featured Speakers:
William McGurn
Frances Hui
Nina Shea
Hong Kong media tycoon and Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai is escorted by the police to the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club Shelter Cove Clubhouse for evidence collection as part of the ongoing investigations on August 11, 2020, in Hong Kong, China. (Anthony Kwan via Getty Images)
13
February 2024
Past Event
The Repression of Hong Kong and Heroism of Jimmy Lai
Hong Kong media tycoon and Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai is escorted by the police to the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club Shelter Cove Clubhouse for evidence collection as part of the ongoing investigations on August 11, 2020, in Hong Kong, China. (Anthony Kwan via Getty Images)
Featured Speakers:
William McGurn
Frances Hui
Nina Shea
A group of pilgrim from China waves a red flag during the Pope Francis weekly general audience in St Peter Square at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 22, 2019. (Photo by Massimo Valicchia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Caption
A group of pilgrim from China waves a red flag during the Pope Francis weekly general audience in St Peter Square at the Vatican on May 22, 2019. (Massimo Valicchia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nina Shea
Nina Shea
Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Religious Freedom
Commentary
13 Min Read