Steven J. Svoboda

(2022 bio to be updated soon) J. Steven Svoboda is founder and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC), a federally and state-certified non-profit corporation that Steven founded in early 1997. Steven graduated summa cum laude in Physics and English (with awards as one of the top two students in each of his majors) from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1983, received a Master's Degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985, and then graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1991. Currently in addition to serving as Executive Director of ARC, he works as a patent lawyer for his own law firm as well as for a prominent Chicago-based law firm and practices human rights law in Richmond, California. Steven obtained 37 patents for Fetch Robotics, which Zebra Robotics purchased for $305 million in July 2021.

Steven has been a social crusader since an early age. He founded ARC in 1997 at the suggestion of Tim Hammond of NOHARMM. He went to law school to be a human rights lawyer, training in human rights work in three trips to Guatemala, work that included visiting morgues to examine corpses for signs of human rights violations and confronting army generals over military violations.

Steven co-led an international team (the International NGO Council on Genital Autonomy or INGOCGA) that in March 2022 completed a five-year project by producing a "core report" on human rights that is posted on the ARC and INGOCGA websites for adaptation for future UN submissions by local activists throughout the world, based on the particular protections and/or violations of genital autonomy occurring in their individual countries. Steven also drafted an “intervention” (a written submission) from INGOCGA as a third party non-governmental organization to the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in a Finnish case involving a parental dispute about circumcising their child.

In October 2013, Steven debated the AAP’s Dr. Michael Brady at the Twentieth Annual Thomas A. Pitts Lectureship in Medical Ethics, held at the Medical University of South Carolina pursuant to a conference titled, “Ethical and Legal Issues in Pediatrics. Steven proved that activists know the science far better than the Task Force and Brady found himself unable after hearing Svoboda’s five-minute presentation in the seminar to rebut a single one of our arguments. As they each personally told Svoboda, two of the five physician presenters who are not AAP Task Force members were completely convinced by our arguments and went from being pretty strongly pro-circumcision prior to the event to coming to oppose the procedure based on our arguments. The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics published the paper by Svoboda and coauthors Bob Van Howe, Peter Adler, which is the longest article Svoboda has ever published and which is already regarded as comprehensive, persuasive, and “groundbreaking.”

In July and August 2001, Steven and ARC organized a team that traveled to Geneva on behalf of ARC to consult with the United Nations’ (UN’s) Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, making oral and written submissions, the latter of which became part of the official UN record and the first document ever accepted by the UN focusing on male circumcision.

Steven has presented at twelve consecutive international symposia on genital autonomy and children’s rights, starting in 1996 in Lausanne, Switzerland, with the most recent one held in August 2022 in Atlanta. His presentations were published as papers in all eight of the symposium conference proceeding books published by Plenum/Kluwer. One of Steven’s and ARC’s proudest accomplishments is publication, since 2000, of 39 issues of our free newsletter, which strives to be more or less a newspaper for intactivism. Our newsletter is carried by all three of the top content providers that electronically provide journals to libraries throughout the world.

Steven has more than forty publications relating to genital autonomy including 1. “Newborn Male Circumcision is Unethical and should be Illegal,” with Peter Adler and Robert S. Van Howe, Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, Summer 2016; 2. “Circumcision of Male Infants as a Human Rights Violation,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 2013; 3. “Out of step: fatal flaws in the latest AAP policy report on neonatal circumcision,” with Robert S. Van Howe, Journal of Medical Ethics, July 2013; 4. “Tortured Bodies, Tortured Minds, Informed Consent as a Legal Fiction Inapplicable to Male Circumcision,” in The Rights of the Child: Ensuring Every Child's Fundamental Right to Body Ownership and Protection from Medical, Cultural, and Religious Infringements (G.C. Denniston et al., eds., Springer, 2012); 5. “Promoting Genital Autonomy by Exploring Commonalities Between Male, Female, Intersex, and Cosmetic Female Genital Cutting,” Global Discourse, Summer 2012.