Nushin Sarkarati is the deputy director of the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council. The Strategic Litigation Project works on prevention and accountability efforts for atrocity crimes, human-rights violations, terrorism, and corruption offenses around the world.
Sarkarati was previously a senior staff attorney at the Center for Justice and Accountability, where she represented victims and survivors of mass atrocities and severe human-rights abuses in pursuing accountability before US courts and foreign national courts through systems of universal jurisdiction. Sarkarati also worked as an associate director at Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program, where she worked on campaigns pursuing justice for victims and survivors of serious international crimes.
Sarkarati has worked with survivor communities around the world in developing investigations and legal strategies to pursue accountability against perpetrators responsible for violations of international law, wherever they are found. She has litigated impact cases on behalf of survivors of torture and other severe human-rights abuses from Liberia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Somalia, and Latin America. She brought the first case against the former Sri Lankan defense secretary for attacks against journalists and the first case against a high-level commander of the Armed Forces of Liberia for crimes against humanity committed during Liberia’s First Civil War. She has represented victims in seeking justice and reparations against two senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and won two separate trial verdicts in US federal court on behalf of survivors of torture in Somalia.