Elise Keppler is executive director of the Global Justice Center, a human rights organization focused on leveraging international law to advance gender equality. Prior to joining Global Justice Center in January 2024, she was associate international justice director and associate general counsel at Human Rights Watch.

For twenty years at Human Rights Watch, she worked to advance justice for serious crimes committed inviolation of international law before domestic, hybrid, and international courts. She focused on situations in Africa and strengthening prospects for credible accountability at the domestic level, including in the Central African Republic, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda. She worked with activists across Africa to counter backlash against the ICC and helped lead campaigns for Darfur’s referral to the ICC and for the surrender of the former Liberian president, Charles Taylor, to face justice. In the General Counsel’s Office, where she worked part time from November 2020 to January 2024, she assessed and mitigated risk to support the organization carrying out its mandate effectively.

In 2012, she was a visiting scholar with the Democratic Governance and Rights Unit at the University of Cape Town’s Faculty of Law. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and a Juris Doctor from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch she worked as an associate at Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP.