Board of Directors and Advisory Board
The Reckoning Project is grateful to the following board members who ensure that goals are met and tasks are completed by advising the work every step of the way.
Board of Directors
Our Governance Board approves policies, bylaws, and provides oversight for the activities of The Reckoning Project.
Fredrik Wesslau
Fredrik Wesslau has more than twenty years of experience working on conflicts and crises around the world for the European Union, the United Nations, and the OSCE. Most recently, he was deputy head of the European Union Advisory Mission to Ukraine where he, among other things, supported Ukraine's law enforcement agencies in gathering evidence and preparing cases on war crimes committed following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He has also worked in Kosovo, the South Caucasus, and Sudan/South Sudan, as well as on counter-piracy in the Indian Ocean.
Andrew Gilmour
Andrew Gilmour is Executive Director of the Berghof Foundation. Andrew served 30 years at the United Nations, most recently as Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights from 2016 to 2019 and as Political Director in the Office of the Secretary-General in New York from 2012 to 2016. He previously held senior UN positions in numerous conflict zones including Iraq, South Sudan, the Middle East, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and West Africa. Andrew served as an Adjunct Fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., and has been awarded a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College Oxford. In 2020 he became a Senior Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
Wayne Jordash
Wayne Jordash is an acclaimed British barrister and has practiced for 20 years in the international human rights and humanitarian law fields. His clients include governments, multilateral institutions (including the UN and Council of Europe), NGOs, corporations, and individuals. His advisory work has included providing specialist advice to Human Rights Watch, the Ugandan, the International Commission of Jurists, among other NGOs. He is one of the founding partners of Global Rights Compliance LLP (GRC). He is engaged as a key expert in the Council of Europe’s business and human rights program.
David J. Simon
David J. Simon is the Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and holds the position of Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and in the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale. His research focuses on mass atrocity prevention and post-atrocity recovery, with a particular focus on cases of mass atrocity in Africa, including those in Rwanda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Cote d'Ivoire. Simon holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and a B.A. from Princeton University. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Genocide Studies. He has served as a consultant with the United Nations Office of the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide.
Geneviève Zubrzycki
Geneviève Zubrzycki is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on nationalism and religion; collective memory and the politics of commemorations; as well as the place of religious symbols in the public sphere. Her most recent book, Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival will appear this summer with Princeton University Press. In addition to her permanent position at the University of Michigan, she has held visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Wassenaar.
Rebecca Harms
Rebecca Harms is a German politician who served as Member of the European Parliament from 2004 until 2019. She is a member of the Alliance '90/The Greens, part of the European Green Party, and an active advocate for the anti-nuclear movement. From 2010 until 2016 she served as president of The Greens–European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament. Harms also serves on the board for such organizations as the EastWest Institute, the German Industry Initiative for Energy Efficiency, Wilhelm Busch Museum, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, and Zentrum Liberale Moderne.
Susan Steele
Susan Steele is the Chair of Filtered Technologies and the Chief People Officer at Ebiquity Plc. She has held Chief HR Officer roles at WPP, Cision and Ocean Technologies Group and served as Chief Learning Officer at Deloitte. Her earlier career was in capital markets leadership roles with JP Morgan Chase- and HSBC-acquired investment banks. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of OpenClassrooms, EmergeEducation’s Workforce Development Edtech board and the Governing Board of the Federation of St Luke’s and Moreland Schools. She previously served as a Trustee of the 21st Century Trust and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and also served on the Fulbright Commission Selection Panel.
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Patrick Costello
Patrick Costello is a Senior Vice President at Mercury Public Affairs and a recognized expert in U.S. foreign policy, trade policy, and business diplomacy. He previously served as the CEO of the American Security Project (ASP), a non-partisan national security think tank in Washington, DC. He spent over a decade at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington where he held a number of senior roles and directed CFR’s interactions with Washington policymakers, most recently as director of Washington External Affairs. He was a government relations counsellor with International Business-Government Counsellors where he provided strategic advice and direct representation assisting businesses in international government relations activities.
Advisory Board
Our Advisory Board is comprised of experts and professionals in relevant fields that share their expertise and insight with our staff.
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Kenneth Roth
Kenneth Roth served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations, which operates in some 100 countries. Before that, Roth was a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigative and advocacy missions around the world. He is quoted widely in the media and has written hundreds of articles on a wide range of human rights issues, devoting special attention to the world’s most dire situations, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between autocracy and democracy. Beginning in September 2023, he will be the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at the Princeton School for Public and International Affairs.
Timothy Snyder
Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is the author of a dozen books, including the bestsellers On Tyranny, Our Malady, The Road to Unfreedom, Black Earth, and Bloodlands. His work has been translated into forty languages and received a number of prizes, including the literature award of the American Academy of Art and Letters, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding.
Oleksandra Matviichuk
Oleksandra Matviichuk is a human rights defender who heads the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties and coordinates the work of Euromaidan SOS. She has authored numerous alternative reports to UN bodies, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE, and the International Criminal Court. In 2016 she received the Democracy Defender Award for Exclusive Contribution to Promoting Democracy and Human Rights. In 2022 she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award and recognized as one of the 25th most influential women in the world by Financial Times. She also contributed to the establishment of the Tribunal for Putin Initiative in order to document international crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in Ukraine. The same year Center for Civil Liberties received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Philippe Sands
Philippe Sands is a distinguished barrister and author, and acts as a member of The Reckoning Project board. He is a specialist in international law, having appeared as counsel and advocate before various international courts and tribunals, including the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and the International Criminal Court. He is the author of fourteen academic books and frequently contributes to the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the Financial Times, and The Guardian. He is currently the Judith Pisar Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Carl Bildt
Carl Bildt is currently co-chair of the European Council of Foreign Relations. He has previously served as prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden, as well as EU special representative for former Yugoslavia, the first high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, UN special envoy to the Balkans, and co-chair of the Dayton Peace Conference.
Serhii Plokhy
Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian history and the Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. His research interests include the cultural, intellectual and international history of Eastern Europe, especially of Ukraine. His books have been translated into more than 10 languages and won numerous prizes and awards such as the 2015 Lionel Gelber Prize and the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize. Through his work, he has also won additional awards such as the 2018 Shevchenko National Prize in Ukraine, the 2015 Antonovych Prize, and the Early Slavic Studies Association Distinguished Scholarship Award, among others.
Linda Kinstler
Linda Kinstler is an award-winning journalist and academic who has reported extensively from Eastern Europe. She is the author of Come To This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, and her writing appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Economist. She is also a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric Department at U.C. Berkeley, where she studies legal history and memory.
James Silk
James J. Silk is the Binger Clinical Professor of Human Rights at Yale Law School, where he teaches the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. He is director of the Law School’s Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights. He founded and directs the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights in Yale College. He was formerly the director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights in Washington, D.C. After completing law school, he was an attorney at the Washington law firm of Arnold & Porter, where his pro bono work included representing a Virginia death-row inmate in his appeals.
Kai Sauer
Kai Sauer is the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Security Policy at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland since June 2019. He also worked as a senior advisor to the former President of Finland and Nobel peace prize winner, Martti Ahtisaari. Mr. Sauer has also served as the Permanent Representative of Finland to the United Nations in New York and has several UN senior roles in relation to the UN mission in Kosovo and the UN intervention in Libya.
Claus Kress
Claus Kress is a Professor of International Law and Criminal Law and the Director of the Institute of International Peace and Security Law at the University of Cologne. In addition to his scholarly work on law, he has been a member of Germany’s delegations in the negotiations regarding the International Criminal Court since 1998. He is a Life Member of Clare Hall College at the University of Cambridge and the recipient of the 2014 Bassiouni Justice Award as well as of honorary doctorates from the Tbilisi State University and the University of Huánuco. Most recently, he has lectured on the need for a special International Criminal Tribunal for the crimes of aggression committed in Ukraine.
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Sevgil Musaieva
Sevgil Musaieva is editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, Ukraine’s leading independent online newspaper covering politics, economics, and culture – and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before joining Ukrainska Pravda, Musaieva served as a business reporter for the newspaper Delo, the weekly Vlast Deneg, and Forbes Ukraine. Under her leadership, Ukrainska Pravda’s journalists have continued their reporting efforts despite Russia’s declared ban on the publication and the dangers of frontline reporting in an active war. Musaieva was a 2019 Harvard University Nieman Fellow and is a six-time winner of the Presszvanie prize for economic journalism in Ukraine. She also received the Anthony Moskalenko Memorial Award for her contribution to the development of Ukrainian journalism, and Time magazine featured her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022. Musaieva is a member of the Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group facing persecution within Russian-occupied Crimea.
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Gillian Tett
Gillian Tett serves as the chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US of the Financial Times and was recently selected to act as Provost of Kings College, Cambridge University in the UK. Tett is the author of Anthro-Vision, A New Way to See Life and Business, published in 2021, which won the Porchlight best business book award and the Columbia Business School Eccles prize. Tett has been named Columnist of the Year (2014), Journalist of the Year (2009), Business Journalist of the Year (2008) in British Press awards and won three American SABEW awards. She has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University based on field work in the former Soviet Union. She was awarded the American Anthropological Association President’s 2021 medal and the 2009 British Academy President medal. She has received honorary degrees from the University of Exeter, the University of Miami, St Andrew’s, London University (Goldsmiths), Carnegie Mellon, Baruch and Lancaster University in the UK.
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French philosopher, filmmaker and writer. He is the author of 47 books and 8 films. Lévy is one of the West's foremost intellectuals, defending democracy and humanism against totalitarianism and fascism. Lévy has made films on the war in Bosnia, Libya, Iraqi Kurdistan besieged by ISIS, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Ukraine. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Lévy has made two new documentary films in Ukraine: Why Ukraine and Slava Ukraini. Lévy's commitment to Ukraine is longstanding. He addressed the crowd on the Maidan in 2014; represented the President of France at the 75th anniversary of Babi Yar commemorations; embedded with the Ukrainian military in Donbas in 2020 and has been back and forth countless times encouraging the brave Ukrainian people in their fight for democracy and freedom.
Corinne Dufka
Corinne Dufka has over 35 years of experience documenting the impact of conflict and crisis on civilians. From 1988 to 1999, she worked with Reuters as a photojournalist covering armed conflicts in El Salvador, Bosnia and Africa. In 1999, she left journalism and joined Human Rights Watch where, for the next two decades and from her base in West Africa, she worked as a senior researcher and advocate documenting atrocities in Liberia, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria and the Sahel, among others. In 2003 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work documenting war crimes in Sierra Leone. Dufka left HRW in 2022, and now works as an independent researcher and advisor, focusing on helping countries mitigate the risk of armed conflict.
Bonnie Weir
Bonnie Weir is the Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education and a Senior Lecturer in Global Affairs. She is the founding co-director of the Program on Peace and Development at Yale University. Bonnie’s research focuses on political violence and post-conflict politics with a focus on Northern Ireland. Her current projects investigate whether and how sectarianism affects political behavior and the consequences of minority rights provisions. She teaches courses on civil conflict, terrorism, and post-conflict politics in Northern Ireland. Bonnie is on the board of Peaceful Schools International and works with a number of groups on applied and policy projects, including the Ad Hoc Committee to Protect the Good Friday Agreement and the Washington Ireland Program.
Richard Rogers
Richard J. Rogers worked as a barrister in London, an attorney in San Francisco, and a senior UN lawyer at several UN war crimes tribunals. Richard has particular expertise in the cross-section between international criminal law and mass environmental destruction and testified to this issue before the US Congress. He is the Executive Director of Climate Counsel – a civil society organisation that pursues environmental justice through international criminal law – and founder of Global Diligence, which specialises in international crime and human rights. Richard was Deputy Co-Chair of the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide and is on the advisory board of the Stop Ecocide Foundation. He currently advises the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General's office on prosecuting environmental war crimes.