Joumana Seif

Guest Author

Joumana Seif (@SeifJoumana) is a Syrian lawyer and legal advisor for the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), where she focuses on Syria and sexual and gender-based violence. At ECCHR, she supported survivors in the al-Khatib trial before the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz—the first trial worldwide on torture in Syria. Seif is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project.

Seif has worked in the human rights field since 2001 and has supported democratic movements in Syria, focusing on political prisoners. In 2023, Seif received the Anne Klein Women’s Award from the Heinrich Böll Foundation for her work as a human rights advocate. She left Syria in 2012, a year after the start of the uprising against the Assad regime. Since then, she cofounded the Syrian Women’s Network, the Syrian Feminist Lobby, and the Syrian Women’s Political Movement. She is also on LinkedIn.