Amir Attaran (Persian: امیر عطاران) is a Canadian professor in both the Faculty of Law and the School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa.

[5][failed verification] From 2000 to 2003, Attaran held a junior academic position at Harvard University in the Kennedy School of Government, where his research focus was on public health law and policy.

[7] From 2003 to 2005, Attaran taught at Yale University in the School of Public Health, and was a fellow at Chatham House (formerly the Royal Institute of International Affairs) in London, where he researched global development, patent law, and access to essential medicines for neglected diseases such as malaria.

Attaran led a controversial global campaign of over 400 scientists and medical doctors, including several Nobel laureates, who wanted an exemption to use DDT in public health because it is extremely effective in reducing the deaths of children from malaria.

[9] South Africa's Medical Research Council subsequently invited Attaran to draft the public health exemption, which countries agreed at the sixth and last negotiation session in Johannesburg as Annex B of the Stockholm Convention.

In 2001, Attaran and Jeffrey Sachs, then at Harvard working on the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, published an influential paper in The Lancet that the editors of that journal suggested may be the "blueprint" for fighting the global HIV/AIDS pandemic on a large scale.

"[15] Attaran and Sachs' policy innovations were widely championed by advocates, and incorporated into the design of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria which launched later that year.

[16] Attaran and human rights lawyer Paul Champ acted as legal counsel for Amnesty International and the BC Civil Liberties Association in a judicial review of the Canadian Forces' detainee policy.

Nonetheless, the Court's decision confirmed that Canada knew about detainees being tortured, as with a man who had "bruising ... consistent with the beating [he] described", and whose story was corroborated by "Canadian personnel [locating] a large piece of braided electrical wire and a rubber hose" in the interrogation room.

The litigation convinced Ontario to strike an advisory panel on infertility[19] that included Attaran in exchange for him adjourning the hearing, the result of which was that the province finally accepted to fund IVF, mooting the legal challenge.

In 2016, Attaran filed a complaint at the Canadian Human Rights Commission alleging that the federal government's Canada Research Chair program discriminated against women, visible minorities, aboriginal people, and persons with disabilities.

Attaran brought legal challenge after the CRC Program's decade-long failure to honour a settlement agreement signed by the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, setting firm employment equity targets for these four groups.

[37][38] In January 2020, Attaran publicly blamed[39] president Trump for the shootdown of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, a disaster that later turned out to be a deliberate act of terrorism perpetrated by IRGC according to an Ontario court.