Sareta Ashraph is a senior legal advisor for 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.

Ashraph is a barrister specialized in international criminal law, with expertise in gender-competent and intersectional analyses of the commission and impact of international crimes. She has served as the director of field investigations for the United Nations (UN) Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for the Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) and as the chief legal analyst to the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria and the Commission of Inquiry on Libya. Previously, Ashraph was a legal adviser to the Defence Office of the International Criminal Court, a human rights officer in the 2009 UN Gaza Fact-Finding Mission, and defense co-counsel before the Special Court for Sierra Leone. In 2020, Sareta was named as one of Apolitical’s 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy.

Over the past decade, Ashraph has been deeply involved in case-building work and strategic litigation relating to Syria and Iraq. This has included leading investigations and legal analysis of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) crimes against the Yazidis, including drafting the United Nations’ report “They Came To Destroy,” which determined that ISIL committed genocide and crimes against humanity. She headed the UNITAD investigation which reached similar findings and was presented to the UN Security Council in May 2021.

Ashraph has lectured at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program during her time as a Wasserstein Fellow, at Stanford Law School as their inaugural global practitioner-in-residence, and at the London School of Economics’ Middle East Centre. She was also a visiting fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford between 2020 and 2022. She currently lectures on gender and international crimes at the Geneva Academy.