Priya Pillai is a nonresident senior fellow with the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council. She is an international lawyer with over two decades of experience and is globally recognized for her expertise in international law and advocacy. Pillai is the executive director of the Asia Justice Coalition, focused on international justice and accountability, leading the coalition since its inception. Under her leadership, the coalition has worked to hold the Burmese military accountable by supporting legal proceedings in international and domestic courts; the coalition has also commenced a multiyear program to enhance women’s leadership in international law across Asian jurisdictions. Previously, she worked at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on trials in the Balkans and at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on global humanitarian issues.

Pillai has contributed expertise to the UN Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response; served as a judge at an international peoples’ tribunal for Ukraine; given a keynote at the Ljubljana-The Hague treaty negotiations; and has been actively working towards a new crimes against humanity treaty. She is a contributing editor at the international law blog Opinio Juris and has been quoted by the Washington Post, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC.

Pillai holds a PhD in international law from the Graduate Institute in Geneva and an LLM from New York University (where she was a global public service scholar). She is a gold medallist from the National Law School of India University in Bangalore. She is a Yale world fellow from 2024 and a fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies.