From Iraq to The Hague: Navigating a Career in International Criminal Law

Join Wasserstein Fellow Lina Biscaia for a community discussion on her career in international organizations, with a focus on the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. Over her 20+ year career, Lina has gone from practicing law in a small village in Portugal to working in war crimes investigations and prosecutions in a variety of settings including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the former Yugoslavia. Lina will describe her career path, covering both the opportunities and challenges that one encounters when building a career in large international organizations, particularly in the international criminal law world.

Lunch provided. Please RSVP below. Open to the HLS community.

Lina started her international career in the field of human rights, and quickly moved on to international criminal law and more specifically investigations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. She has worked with the International Criminal Court, the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the UN backed Special Panels for Serious Crimes in Timor-Leste. She has worked for a variety of organisations including the United Nations, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). In addition to posts in The Hague and Geneva, she has also worked in Timor-Leste, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Haiti, and Iraq.

In the last decade, Lina has specialised on sexual and gender-based violence in conflict. She’s currently the Head of the Gender and Children Unit of UNITAD where she leads a team investigating sexual and gender-based crimes (SGBC), including against the Yazidis, and crimes against children. Lina was the lead for the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, coordinating investigations on and analyzing evidence of sexual and gender-based violence in the Syrian conflict and was the author of a highly regarded report on this. After leaving the Commission of Inquiry, she served as a legal advisor on SGBC with the UN IIIM (Syria) before moving to working with OPCW on chemical weapons attacks. While SBGC has been a focus of her work, she has worked on crimes against children, both in the Syrian conflict and notably with regard to child soldiers in the DRC leading to the Lubanga case at the ICC.

If you or an event participant requires disability-related accommodations, please contact HLS Accessibility Services at accessibility@law.harvard.edu two weeks in advance of the event.