Joumana Seif

Joumana Seif  (@SeifJoumana) is a Syrian women’s and human rights activist and lawyer. She is a Research Fellow with the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin (@ECCHRBerlin). She co-authored, with Wejdan Nassif, Words against Silence, a report on the imprisonment of activists in Syria.

She is a co-founder of the Syrian Women’s Network and the Syrian Women’s Political Movement— Syria’s first women-led political movement. Joumana is also the Chairperson of The Day After , an organization founded in 2012 to support a democratic  transition in Syria.

In June 2022 she spoke at the UN Security Council Arria-formula meeting on Syrian women’s voices on detainees and the disappeared in Syria.

She is the 2023 recipient of the Anne Klein Women’s Award, an honour by the Heinrich Böll Foundation recognizing global activists against sexualized violence in armed conflict.

Joumana comes from a politically active family. Her father, a dissident Member of Parliament, went to prison multiple times for his criticism of the Assad regime, and the family’s textile factory was taxed into bankruptcy. In 2012, Joumana fled to Berlin, Germany, where she works to bring women’s voices into peace negotiations and to end the devastating war in Syria. Since 2017, she has worked with the International Crimes and Accountability program of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, focusing on sexual and gender-based violence committed in Syrian detention facilities.