Nasredeen Abdulbari is a nonresident senior fellow with the N7 Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East programs and was formerly Sudan’s minister of justice. In that capacity, he served as the principal legal advisor to the Sudanese government, leading and directing Sudan’s legal and justice reforms. He also participated in and contributed to the overall political-reform and state-restructuring efforts and processes in Sudan. 

Prior to his appointment as minister of justice in 2019, Abdulbari worked as a consultant for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, as a legal advisor to the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission to the United States, and as a research consultant for the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, DC. 

Previously, he was a lecturer in the International and Comparative Law Department at the University of Khartoum, where he taught courses on public international law, conflict of laws, and introduction to the English legal system. He also worked, as part of a Satter Fellowship from Harvard Law School, as a staff attorney and head of the Protection, Peacebuilding, and Psychosocial Unit of the Sudan Social Development Organization. In East Africa, Abdulbari was a senior researcher at the Rift Valley Institute and consultant for the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. 

He authored academic articles that were published in journals such as the Journal of African Law (London University), the African Human Rights Law Journal (Pretoria University), the Birkbeck Law Review (London University), and the Harvard Human Rights Law Journal. In addition, he authored opinion articles that were, inter alia, published in the Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, and Global Observatory. He is a coauthor of a book in Arabic titled The Future Constitution of Sudan: Aspirations and Views published in 2013 by the Ahfad University for Women, in Khartoum, Sudan. His most recent work, “The Interlinkage between Understandings of Self-Determination and Understandings of Peace,” was published as a book chapter in the book Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Beyond published through Oxford University Press. 

Abdulbari holds a Bachelor of Laws with honors and a Master of Laws from the University of Khartoum, where he won nine academic distinction awards; a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School, where he was a Stoffel scholar and a Landon H. Gammon fellow; and a Doctor of Juridical Science from the Georgetown University Law Center.