Center for Reproductive Rights
Nancy Northup, President and CEO
Nancy Northup is President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global human rights organisation whose game changing litigation and advocacy work have transformed how reproductive rights are understood by courts, governments, and human rights bodies.
Under her leadership, the Center has played a key role in securing legal victories in the U.S., Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe and at the U.N. on issues including access to life-saving obstetrics care, maternal health, contraception, and safe abortion services, as well as the prevention of forced sterilisation and child marriage. With offices in Colombia, Kenya, Switzerland, and the U.S., the Center has built the legal capacity of women’s rights advocates in over 60 countries.
Nancy was previously the founding director of the Democracy Programme at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she litigated voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ballot access cases. From 1989 to 1996, she served as a prosecutor and Deputy Chief of Appeals in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Prior to that she was a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. She has held adjunct appointments at NYU Law School and Columbia Law School, and taught courses in constitutional and human rights law. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Nancy graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and received her J.D. from Columbia Law School. She is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Brown University recognising her achievements as an attorney and global reproductive rights leader.
A frequent public speaker, Nancy is quoted widely in the national press including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post, and has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, FOX News, PBS, MSNBC, and NPR.
Catalina Martinez Coral
Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean
Catalina Martinez Coral is a feminist from Cali, Colombia. She is currently the Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean of the Center for Reproductive Rights. She is a member of the Causa Justa movement and one of the plaintiffs in the historic ruling that partially decriminalised abortion in Colombia. She was one of lawyers who litigated the Guzmán Albarracín v. Ecuador and Manuela v. El Salvador cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
She is also part of the They are Girls, Not Mothers movement and was one of the litigants who presented the cases of that campaign before the UN Human Rights Committee. She previously worked at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as a Human Rights Specialist.
Catalina holds two Master's degrees in public international law and international relations from the Universities of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne and the Institute of Political Studies of Paris (Sciences Po).
Salima Namusobya
Salima Namusobya is the Vice President for Africa at the Center for Reproductive Rights and an expert member of the Working Group on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR). She was the founding Executive Director of the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights, and previously served in various capacities at the Refugee Law Project, School of Law, Makerere University, and as Eastern Africa coordinator for a global project on International Law in Domestic Courts.
She is a lawyer who has specialised in human rights law and forced migration. She has vast experience in legal and policy development, research, litigation, and advocacy to advance social and economic rights – including reproductive rights especially on the African continent. She is a board member for some national and international human rights NGOs and is a member of the Uganda Law Society and the East Africa Law Society.
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