Rothna
Begum

Rothna Begum is the Legal Advocacy Director at the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s Waging Justice for Women initiative. She has over 17 years’ professional experience in human rights, including expertise on women’s rights and migrant workers’ rights.

Before joining CFJ in 2024, she was Associate Director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. She led the research and advocacy on women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa region including domestic violence, discriminatory family laws and migrant domestic work. She also led the advocacy for a new global treaty on violence and harassment at work – ILO C190 – adopted by the International Labour Organization in June 2019. From 2008-2013 she worked at Amnesty International’s Middle East division.

She has published numerous human rights reports and opinion pieces, including for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Foreign Policy. She features regularly in the media, including in BBC documentaries and TED talks. She is a member of the ILO Regional Office for Arab States’ Migration Advisory Group and an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. She holds a LLB in Law and a LLM in Legal Theory from the London School of Economics (LSE).