Katrina Anderson

Katrina Anderson first worked at the Center from 2006-2009, first as a Blackmun Litigation Fellow and then as a Human Rights Attorney, and returned in 2011 in her current position. She leads the Center's work to integrate international human rights strategies into domestic legal advocacy. Her work prioritizes engagement with the United Nations system to hold the U.S. government accountable to its international obligations under human rights treaties and other global standards.

Katrina developed and leads the Center's advocacy strategy to achieve recognition of reproductive healthcare providers as women's human rights defenders. Such recognition triggers obligations for the U.S. government to protect abortion providers dealing with threats, legal restrictions, and harassment that jeopardize their human rights and those of their patients. She conceptualized the Center's ground-breaking Defending Human Rights: Abortion Providers Under Siege report about the situation of abortion providers in six U.S. states. This report and related advocacy prompted the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders to categorize providers as human rights defenders for the first time in December 2010. In 2008, Katrina authored the Center's shadow report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination for its periodic review of the United States. This advocacy resulted in recommendations by the CERD Committee to the U.S government to identify racial disparities in sexual and reproductive health as a form of discrimination, and take positive steps to eliminate them.

Katrina has lived and worked extensively outside the United States, including most recently in the Netherlands, where she served as Legal Officer for the Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice. Prior to joining the Center, she worked in Thailand and Cambodia for several years documenting human rights abuses against women and girls.

She is a gradulate of the University of Virginia (B.A. in English), Seattle University School of Law (J.D., summa cum laude) and American University Washington College of Law (LL.M. in International Legal Studies).