Joumana Seif

Joumana Seif  (@SeifJoumana) is a Syrian lawyer and activist. She is a legal advisor with the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights with a  focus on Syria and sexual and gender-based violence. She worked with @ECCHRBerlin on the Koblenz trial for crimes against humanity of murder, torture, and sexual violence  by members of the Assad regime.

She is a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project which works on the prevention of and accountability for atrocity crimes, human rights violations, terrorism, and corruption offences around the world. She is working with other members of civil society to push for establishment of an intergovernmental Syria victims fund, from the proceeds of sanctions and other sources.

Joumana is 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 Chairperson of The Day After , an organization founded in 2012 to support a democratic  transition in Syria. She is a member of the Policy Coordination Group, a Syrian-led initiative on the missing and disappeared facilitated by the International Commission on Missing Persons.

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. Joumana co-authored, with Wejdan Nassif, Words against Silence, a report on the imprisonment of activists 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.