Carolina Gottardo

Carolina is a lawyer and economist who has worked on human rights issues for more than 20 years in different countries and contexts. Carolina’s areas of specialization are gender, asylum and migration. She is the Director of Jesuit Refugee Service, Australia. Previously she was the director of a women’s rights organisation working with refugee and migrant women in the UK for 6 years. Carolina served as the National Policy and Research Director of the Refugee Council of Australia in 2006/07. She has also been a senior manager at the British Institute of Human Rights, British Red Cross and One World Action (now Womankind Worldwide) in the UK. She worked for the Constitutional Court and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in her native country, Colombia.  Carolina has served on a number of boards related to human rights, gender, migration and refugee issues including law centres, the Asylum seekers Appeals Project, LIBERTY and Maternity Action in London and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented migrants (PICUM ) in Brussels. Carolina is currently a member of the executive committee of the End Child Detention Coalition (ECDC) Australia and the chair of the women and girls group and focal point on the Global compact on Migration at the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN). Carolina has good advocacy experience at UN level. She is currently one of two civil society members of the global Expert Working Group to address the human rights of women in the Global Compact on safe, orderly and regular migration convened by UN Women with the participation of several UN agencies and committees. She is the mother of three boys and enjoys spending time with her family.

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