Kim Thuy Seelinger is an expert on gender-based violence in armed conflict and forced displacement, focusing on survivors’ needs for protection and accountability and strengthening the support and legal systems they encounter. Seelinger engages with justice actors, victims’ advocates, human rights defenders and asylum adjudicators to develop survivor-centered approaches in Africa, Europe and the Americas.  

Before joining the School of Public Health, Seelinger worked for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In 2021, she was appointed special adviser on sexual violence in conflict to the court’s prosecutor. After co-drafting the Office of the Prosecutor’s Policy on Gender-based Crimes and Policy on Children in 2023, she was named the senior coordinator on gender-based crimes and crimes against and affecting children. In this role, she oversaw relevant initiatives, policy implementation, training curricula, and technical assistance to trial teams. 

Seelinger has been an inaugural member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ Advisory Group on Gender, Forced Displacement, and Protection, and an expert commentator on the International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict (2014, 2017). She is a technical adviser to the Global Survivors’ Fund, established by 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winners Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad. 

Seelinger previously worked at WashU’s Brown School, and before that at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she received honors for her teaching and service, including a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency in 2016. She started her legal career in New York City post-9/11, representing low-income immigrants facing deportation or seeking asylum from gender-based violence, including conflict-related sexual violence. Seelinger also served as a Yale-China Association Legal Fellow at Yunnan University in Southwest China, focusing on the rights of HIV+ individuals, and worked at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Hastings. She remains a senior research fellow at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and is an active member of the New York State Bar. 

Areas of focus:

  • Sexual and gender-based violence. 
  • Refugee protection. 
  • Survivors’ support in humanitarian crises. 
  • War crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. 
  • Immigrants’ rights. 
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