Bio
Rosa da Costa is a Human Rights lawyer with expertise and publications in a range of human rights areas. These include refugee law and internal displacement, women's rights, administration of justice, integration, international humanitarian law and children's rights.
She has worked with several UN agencies including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), participated in emergency missions and led a number of regional projects. As of 2008 she served as a Human Rights Officer with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, where she worked on issues of violence against women, internal displacement and modern forms of slavery. In that context she drafted thematic and Country Visit reports to the HRC and GA, and participated in official country visits, including to numerous conflict and post-conflict situations intended to provide assessments of country conditions and recommendations, (e.g., Iraq, Sudan, Cote D’Ivoire, Azerbaijan, Syria, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Ghana). She has also worked with the Office of the Representative of Children in Armed Conflict, a number of non-governmental organisations, and briefly with the Canadian Government. Rosa has lived and worked in Canada, Thailand, the Czech Republic, Türkiye, Switzerland, Israel and the UK.
From 2018-2020, Rosa was a lecturer in international law and ethics of forced displacement in the MA Program in International Migration Studies at Tel Aviv University She has collaborated with a number of Universities such as the International Women's Human Rights Clinic at Georgetown Law School, and The Minerva Centre for Law in Extreme Conditions, Haifa University, where she is a researcher on a project examining the nexus between corruption and migration. She is currently living in London, and interested in further exploring issues related to displacement, gender, grand corruption and the relationship between human rights, democracy and contemporary power structures.