Silvia Serrano-Guzmán is the associate director of the Health and Human Rights Initiative at the O’Neill Institute and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University. She has trained state officials in various countries in international human rights law and has carried out capacity-building training for human rights defenders and civil society organizations. She also teaches in master’s and specialization programs in various law schools and institutions in Latin America.
Before joining the O’Neill Institute, Serrano-Guzmán was an attorney at the Executive Secretariat of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, where she managed merits stage cases regarding the member states of the Organization of American States and supervised the preparation of the reports on the merits. She was also responsible for the litigation of cases submitted to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). Serrano-Guzmán acted as legal counsel for the IACHR in contentious cases of international human rights law including cases of grave human rights violations, transitional justice, the death penalty, the right to health, discrimination based on sexual orientation, indigenous people’s rights, human rights defenders, the rights of children and adolescents, migrants’ rights, gender-based violence, and reproductive health.
Serrano-Guzmán obtained her law degree in Colombia at the Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga. She also holds an LL.M. in international legal studies with a certificate in international human rights law from Georgetown University Law Center and an M.A. in legal argumentation from the University of Alicante. She is currently an S.J.D. candidate at Georgetown University Law Center.
