Mansour Hamid Al-Omari is a Syrian journalist, human rights defender and legal researcher, born in Damascus in 1979. He studied English literature at Damascus University and began his career in translation and journalism before becoming editor-in-chief of the English section of Peace Weekly and the official translator for the Damascus Short Film Festival, later contributing to Orient Net and other local Syrian media. From 2011, he worked with the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression and the Violations Documentation Center to document the names of disappeared political activists. On 16 February 2012, he was arrested by Air Force Intelligence during a raid on CMFE’s Damascus office and subjected to enforced disappearance, torture and detention in multiple facilities (including nine months under Maher al-Assad’s oversight) before being released on 7 February 2013. During his detention, he clandestinely recorded the names of fellow detainees on scraps of fabric using blood and rust, exfiltrated these after his release, and they are now preserved at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Since then, he has continued his advocacy from exile (now in Sweden) earning recognition such as the 2012 PEC award and the 2013 Hellman-Hammett prize, while pursuing an LLM in Transitional Justice and Conflict and collaborating with Syrian and international organisations to pursue accountability for atrocity crimes.