Claudia Escobar

Dr. Claudia Escobar (@ClaudiaEJueza) is a former magistrate of the Court of Appeals of Guatemala. Reelected in 2014 to a second term, she resigned due to executive and legislative interference in the judiciary and relocated to the United States as a result of intimidation back home. She is a Centennial Fellow in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where she focuses on the independence of the judiciary as a tool to fight corruption. When she fled Guatemala, Harvard University named her a 2015 Scholar-at-Risk Fellow and accepted her at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, making her the first Central American to be admitted to the program. She received the Democracy Award by the National Endowment for Democracy. In Guatemala, she was founder of the Judiciary Institute and the Association for the Development of Democratic Institutionality and Comprehensive Development for Central America (Asociación FIDDI), organizations dedicated to promoting the rule of law in Guatemala. Dr. Escobar obtained her PhD at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, her law degree at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala, and attended Louisiana State University.