text: Susana SáCouto is Director of the War Crimes Research Office (WCRO) at the Washington College of Law (AUWCL), which promotes the development and enforcement of international criminal and humanitarian law. She also directs AUWCL’s Summer Law Program in The Hague, which offers JD and LL.M. students the opportunity for intensive study in international criminal law in The Hague. She is also Professorial Lecturer-in-Residence at WCL, where she teaches courses on ICL, advanced topics in international criminal law and procedure, and international legal responses to conflict-based sexual and gender violence, as well as an experiential learning course dealing with these areas of law. Ms. SáCouto’s background includes extensive practical experience with organizations working on ICL, IHL and/or human rights issues at both the domestic and international level, including Women Empowered Against Violence, Inc., the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Center for Human Rights Legal Action in Guatemala, and the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. She has published widely on variety of ICL issues, served as co-chair of the Women’s International Law Interest Group of the American Society for International Law (2006-2009 term), and was awarded The Women’s Law Center 22nd Annual Dorothy Beatty Memorial Award for significant contributions to women’s rights. In December 2017, she was honored as part of the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice’s Gender Justice Legacy Wall, which celebrates judges, practitioners, academics, advocates, diplomats, survivors, witnesses, and others who have helped shape the field of international gender justice over the past 125 years.
  alysson ford ouoba
  assistant director
  Alysson Ford Ouoba is the Assistant Director of the War Crimes Research Office (WCRO). Prior to joining the WCRO, Alysson was an associate in the Human Rights Practice Group at Cohen Milstein, where she assisted survivors of forced labor, human trafficking, arbitrary detentions, torture, and other violations of international law. In that role, Alysson investigated claims of abuses, prepared complaints, and represented human rights victims in proceedings before U.S. courts at both the trial and appellate levels. Alysson also clerked at the District Court for the Eastern District of New York and the D.C. Court of Appeals. Prior to law school, Alysson worked in international development for several years, including on projects to build elementary schools in Burkina Faso, promote girls’ education in Cote d’Ivoire, and improve microfinance services in Ecuador. She holds a B.A. from Harvard College; an M.Sc. from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies; and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
  Officer
  professor robert k. goldman
  officer/faculty director
  Robert Kogod Goldman is Professor of Law and Louis C. James Scholar at American University's Washington College of Law, where he has taught since 1971. Professor Goldman is also Faculty Director of the War Crimes Research Office and Co-Director of the Law School's Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. He was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights from 1996 to 2003 and its President from March 1999 to March 2000. In 2004 and 2005 he served as the U.N. Human Rights Commission's Independent Expert on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, and in July 2005 he was appointed as one of eight experts, and the only American, to an International Commission of Jurists’ Eminent Jurists Panel to examine issues of counter-terrorism and human rights. Professor Goldman teaches and publishes on subjects relating to International Law, Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law.