Rosa Celorio

Rosa Celorio is the Burnett Family Associate Dean and Distinguished Professorial Lecturer for International and Comparative Legal Studies. In this capacity, she directs the International and Comparative Law program at GW Law, and teaches the courses International Law of Human Rights, International Human Rights of Women, Regional Protection of Human Rights, and Fundamental Issues in US Law. Previously, she worked for more than a decade as Senior Attorney for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), one of the main organs of the regional human rights protection system for the Americas, where she held several leadership positions, including the supervision of all the legal work performed by the specialized Rapporteurships on women, LGBTI persons, indigenous peoples, racial discrimination, and children. 

Dean Celorio has worked in the field of international human rights law, intersectional discrimination, and gender issues for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM-currently UN Women) in New York and Ecuador; and as a lawyer in the law firms of Murphy, Hesse, Toomey and Lehane in Boston and O’Neill & Borges in Puerto Rico. She has also acted as an advisor for several global initiatives implemented by various United Nations Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups. Between 2013 and 2014, she taught the Human Rights Fact-Finding Practicum at Georgetown University Law Center, with a focus on statelessness, the rights of minorities, and economic, social, and cultural rights. The resulting report received the 2014 award of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for outstanding student research in the field of statelessness. She has appeared in various media outlets, including CNN and Deutsche Welle.

Among her recent activities, Dean Celorio is currently serving in the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and as a Member of the World Health Organization Global Advisory Committee on Maternal Health Issues. She recently served as Senior Advisor to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) in the drafting of its new General Recommendation on Indigenous Women and Girls and as the International Human Rights Dispute Resolution Authority monitoring compliance with the rights of indigenous peoples in Belize. She is an invited professor in the Masters of Human Rights Law of the University of Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. 

Dean Celorio writes frequently on issues related to international human rights law and marginalized communities, women’s rights and gender equality, intersectional discrimination, and the environment and climate change.  Among her recent publications are Women and International Human Rights in Modern Times; A Contemporary Casebook (Edward Elgar, 2022); International Human Rights: Problems of Law, Policy, and Practice (Aspen Publishers, 2023, 7^th edition, with Hurst Hannum, S. James Anaya, and Dinah Shelton); and the article the Kaleidoscope of Climate Change and Human Rights: The Promise of International Litigation for Women, Indigenous Peoples, and Children, to be published by the Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy (Spring 2023). Dean Celorio is from Puerto Rico.

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