Sandra Coliver

Sandra Coliver is senior legal officer on freedom of information and expression with the Open Society Justice Initiative, based in the New York office. Previously, she served as the director of the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, which worked to hold human rights abusers legally accountable. For more than two decades, she has managed or participated in human rights and rule of law programs around the world, including for three years in Bosnia with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Crisis Group and the OSCE.

As director of Article 19’s law program (1990-96), she coordinated the drafting of the Johannesburg Principles on National Security, Freedom of Expression (FOE) and Access to Information, wrote a commentary and edited a book of papers on that theme; wrote A19’s first Handbook on FOE Best Law and Practice; edited a book on hate speech laws and practice in two dozen countries; and co-authored two other books on freedom of expression and information issues.

Coliver received her law degree from the University of California at Berkeley and her undergraduate degree from Yale. She clerked for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and worked as a public defender and a litigator in private practice in San Francisco. Before joining the Open Society Justice Initiative, she was a member of the Faculty of the Summer Program on International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law.