Speaker details

Biography

Provisional Ambassador Beth Van Schaack, PhD, US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Ambassador Beth Van Schaack is the US State Department’s sixth Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice (GCJ). She served as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large in GCJ from 2012 to 2013. Prior to returning to public service in 2022, Ambassador Van Schaack was the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, where she taught international criminal law, human rights, human trafficking, and a policy lab on Legal & Policy Tools for Preventing Atrocities. In addition, she directed Stanford’s International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic. She has published numerous articles and papers on international human rights and justice issues. From 2014 to 2022, she served as Executive Editor for Just Security, an online forum for the analysis of national security, foreign policy, and rights. Ambassador Van Schaack is a graduate of Stanford (BA), Yale (JD) and Leiden (PhD) Universities. She began her academic career at Santa Clara University School of Law, where, in addition to teaching and writing on international human rights issues, she served as the Academic Adviser to the United States interagency delegation to the International Criminal Court Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda. She has also been a practicing lawyer at Morrison & Foerster, LLP; the Center for Justice & Accountability, a human rights law firm; and the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.