Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona
Magdalena Sepúlveda is the executive director of the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. She is also member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT) and the United Nations High Level Panel on International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda. From 2008 to 2014 she was the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. From 2013 to 2017 she was a member of the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). In 2015, she was recognized in the Global Tax 50, a list of individuals and organizations with the biggest impact on taxation worldwide.
Sepúlveda’s 25-year career has focused on the intersection of poverty, development and human rights, and has bridged research and policy formulation. She has worked as a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, as a staff attorney at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, as the co-director of the Department of International Law and Human Rights of the UN-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica and as a research director at the International Council on Human Rights Policy in Geneva. She has also served as a consultant to a range of international organizations including UNWomen, the World Bank Group, UNHCR, UNICEF, ILO and OHCHR. She has worked with numerous NGOs, including as a member of several boards of directors. She has published widely on human rights, fiscal policies, poverty, gender and development and has taught university courses in Latin America and the United Kingdom. She frequently writes op-ed columns and her pieces have been published in more than 30 countries.
Sepúlveda holds a Ph.D. in international law from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, an LL.M in human rights law from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom and a postgraduate diploma on comparative constitutional law from the Universidad Católica de Chile.