Susanna Sirkin

Bio:

Susannah Sirkin is director of international policy and partnerships at Physicians for Human Rights. She previously served as deputy director at PHR from 1987 to 2013. Currently, Sirkin and her colleagues at PHR are leading a new effort to train doctors, lawyers, law enforcement, and judges to respond to sexual violence in conflict zones, initially working in the DRC and Kenya. In 2012, she collaborated with the Nobel Women’s Initiative to launch the International Campaign to Stop Sexual and Gender Based Violence in Conflict. Sirkin also serves on the steering board of UK Foreign Secretary William Hague’s Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative. In her years at PHR, Sirkin has organized health and human rights investigations to dozens of countries, including the documentation of genocide and systematic rape in Darfur and Sudan and exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the international criminal tribunals. Sirkin also served from 1992 to 2001 for PHR as a member of the coordination committee of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace.

WMC Women Under Siege

June 20, 2014 | Susanna Sirkin | International, Violence against women

How to seize the huge opportunity created by the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict

“What a fabulous suit. She was perfect, perfect,” said a French woman standing behind me on the escalator. We had just emerged from two hours in a giant auditorium on the outskirts of London where we heard politicians, UN officials, and Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee speaking at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, billed as the largest gathering ever to focus attention and develop effective solutions to ending rape in war.

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