Alicia Eli Yamin

Today we’re marching for change with Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH PhD, a mother, daughter, sister, women’s advocate, a Lecturer on Law and Senior Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, where she directs the Global Health and Rights Project. Yamin currently teaches at Harvard Medical School as well as Harvard Law School. She is the founding editor of the multi-disciplinary Brill/Nijhoff series, “Global Health, Human Rights and Social Justice.”

Yamin has held distinguished visitorships at a variety of universities around the world, and is known globally for her inter-disciplinary work in relation to economic and social rights, reproductive justice, the right to health, and the intersections between development paradigms, political economy and human rights.

But she is not just an academic.  Yamin has lived in Latin America and East Africa for much of her professional life and worked with local advocacy organizations, including co- founding a program on health and human rights in Peru. In the United States, Yamin served as Director of Research and Investigations at Physicians for Human Rights, Senior Advisor to Amnesty International in its Global Campaign on Poverty, Demand Dignity, and Senior Adviser on Human Rights and Health Policy at Partners In Health. She is now on the coordinating committee of the all-volunteer Defend Public Health, which was established when the second Trump Administration came into office.

In 2016, Yamin was appointed by the UN Secretary-General as one of ten international experts to the Independent Accountability Panel for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health in the Sustainable Development Goals (2016-2018, reappointed 2018-2020). She served as chief consultant to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and drafter of the first guidance on a ‘human rights-based approach to health’ to be adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in 2012, which related to maternal health.

Yamin has served on numerous other UN, WHO and other expert committees on global health.

 But her work is notable for how it uses the law as well. As a specialist in international and comparative law relating to health and sexual and reproductive rights issues, Yamin regularly submits Amicus Curiae briefs and provides expert testimony to tribunals around the globe. In 2011, Yamin was named by the Colombian Constitutional Court as an Independent Expert on the implementation of T-760/08, a structural judgment that led to significant health system reform. She also served on the oversight committee for health of the Constitutional Implementation Commission in Kenya (2012-2015).

A revised and substantially expanded second edition of her latest monograph, When Misfortune becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality, was published by Stanford University Press in 2023, and a Spanish version from the Editorial UniAndes/Siglo (Colombia) just came out in 2026.

Listen to Alicia’s inspiring story.