Godfrey Odongo

Godfrey Odongo is a nonresident senior fellow with the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council. Odongo is a lawyer with more than two decades of advocacy, research, policy, and teaching experience on international law, human rights, and governance. He is co-editor of the African Human Rights Law Journal.

Previously, Odongo led grantmaking at Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, a New York-based private foundation. As a senior program officer, he managed a funding portfolio that strengthened global civil society ecosystems and advanced policy and legal accountability for human rights, including measures to redress and prevent serious human rights violations and crimes committed during armed conflict.

He has also previously served as a visiting research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, as an East Africa researcher for Amnesty International’s International Secretariat; and as a program advisor with Save the Children-Sweden. He also held research fellowship roles with the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the Danish Institute for Human Rights in Copenhagen. Odongo has edited a legal commentary book and written several peer-reviewed book chapters, articles in international journals, and research reports on a range of human rights issues including post-conflict transitional justice, international criminal law, the rights to freedom of expression and assembly, refugee and migrant rights, and the domestication of socioeconomic and children’s rights.

Odongo holds a PhD in international human rights law from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, an LLM in comparative legal studies from Pace University Law School in New York, an LLM in human rights and democratization in Africa from the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and an LLB from Moi University in Kenya.