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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.