Zahra Rose D’Souza LL.M. ’16 has been awarded the 2015 Philadelphia Bar Association International Law Committee Award for Outstanding Achievement in International Law or Human Rights. She is one of three area LL.M. students to receive the award.
D’Souza is a student in Temple’s LL.M. program for foreign-trained lawyers. She enrolled in Temple’s LL.M. degree program to supplement her skills and expand her scope as a global cyberprivacy and technology law expert, and is doing research with Associate Dean Duncan Hollis to that end. She is a 2011 LL.B. honors graduate of the University of London. During her LL.B. studies, D’Souza engaged in research analyzing the effectiveness of extraterritorial laws related to child sex trafficking prosecution. Immediately after graduation she spent one year as an associate at United Bank Ltd and focused her practice on labor law.
In 2012, D’Souza accepted a position at a private law firm, where she expanded her focus to information technology law, telecommunications contracts and media law, intellectual property rights, commercial, and labor law. In addition to her practice work at the firm, both D’Souza and her law firm partner served as international legal and policy consultants to the Council of Europe and Pakistan on matters of cybercrime and electronic transactions. She is a member of the Developing Countries Centre on Cybercrime.
D’Souza’s consulting work is wide-ranging. In 2013, she co-drafted a report on the legal framework for e-procurement readiness and implementation with an in-depth analysis of the procurement law and other legislation in Pakistan for the World Bank. More recently, she has worked on consulting projects with the governments of Tonga and Fiji.
Some of D’Souza’s other projects include: co-drafting the Electronic Transaction Act for the National Centre for Information Technology in the Maldives; providing commentary to the government of Ghana on Pakistan’s Electronic Transactions Act of 2008 and the Mutual Legal Assistance Act of 2010; providing commentary on the Republic of Tanzania’s Computer Crime and Cybercrime legislation to Pakistan’s Ministry of Communications, Science and Technology; and providing similar expertise in cybercrime legislation in Jamaica, Kenya, Dominica, Trinidad, Tobago, and South Africa. D’Souza prepared the Cyberwiki pages for Pakistan and Afghanistan and assisted in drafting Pakistan’s Prevention of Electronic Crimes and National Cyber Security Acts.