Julie Arostegui Leftwich is an international human rights and gender expert with extensive experience in peace and security, rule of law, access to justice, combating gender-based violence, women’s political participation, refugee and asylum law, democracy and governance, and security sector reform. She has managed programs related to gender justice, women’s rights, and the rule of law in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, and has advised, trained, and published extensively on gender, peace and security, women’s rights, international human rights law, gender-based violence, refugee and asylum law, and human trafficking.
As Senior Gender Advisor with Freedom House, Ms. Leftwich provided expertise to a coalition of organizations to ensure implementation of gender into human rights programming supported by USAID. As a gender advisor with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), she provided training for Syrian human rights defenders on advocacy around sexual violence in conflict, organized a roundtable of experts to examine sexual violence in conflict, and analyzed pathways to power of women heads of state. As Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Policy Director with Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND), Ms. Leftwich worked with U.S. lawmakers and parliamentarians from the Middle East and North Africa to implement WPS principles at the domestic and international levels. With funding from the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) and support from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Women in International Security (WIIS), she created, directed, and managed a project working with groups in the Great Lakes region of Africa to integrate gender equality and women’s rights into post-conflict structures and identify best practices for working with policymakers, legal practitioners, judges, civil society and religious and community leaders. She also helped develop USIP’s pilot course on gender and peacebuilding. Additionally, she served as a facilitator for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies’ Workshop on Inclusive Security Leadership at the National Defense University and was a guest lecturer on gender and security at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies and Bundeswehr University/Munich.
Ms. Leftwich has also worked with One Earth Future Foundation, International Association of Women Judges, American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), Internews, and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. She is adjunct faculty at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, and held adjunct faculty appointments at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Korbel School of International Affairs at the University of Denver. Her teaching focuses on human rights, women, peace, and security, and refugee and asylum law.
Ms. Leftwich is the Founder and Executive Director of the Immigrant and Refugee Law Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, a one-of-a-kind nonprofit that provides pro bono legal services to low income immigrant and refugee families through local schools, where she also represents women seeking asylum from gender violence.
