Judith Armatta, is a champion for the Rule of Law. As a
lawyer, journalist, and human-rights activist she monitored the trial of
Slobodan Milošević on behalf of the Coalition for International Justice and
wrote nearly 300 articles for CIJ’s website. Her dispatches from The Hague
also appeared in Tribunal Update, published by the Institute for War and
Peace Reporting, and Monitor, a magazine of political commentary published
in Montenegro. Throughout the trial, she was the “go-to” person for the
international press, giving countless interviews and providing extensive
background information and analysis. Her commentary was published in The
International Herald Tribune and The
Chicago Tribune and aired on NPR, BBC, CBC, Voice of America, CNN, and ITN.
Prior to her work in The Hague, Armatta was liaison for the American Bar
Association’s Central and East European Law Initiative, opening offices in
Belgrade, Serbia (in 1997) and Montenegro (in 1999), where she assisted
local efforts to promote rule of law. In Serbia, she supported the formation
of an independent judges’ association and helped organize the first
conference of women lawyers from throughout the former Yugoslavia since the
wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia. During the Kosova War, she headed a
War Crimes Documentation Project among Kosovar Albanian refugees in
Macedonia. In Montenegro, she assisted the Minister of Justice on
a sweeping law reform agenda.
Armatta has consulted on international humanitarian, human rights, and other
rule-of-law issues, primarily in the Middle East. Her work has included assisting
law professors at Al Quds University in the West Bank to establish a moot court program,
a women and the law course, and an international humanitarian and human rights law
institute. In 2009, she co-authored an assessment of Iraqis’ access to legal redress.
For over three decades, she has worked to increase awareness of and
response to violence against women and children—in her home state of Oregon,
as well as at the national and international level. For ten years she was
legal counsel to the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence,
a network of 33 grassroots programs throughout Oregon. Armatta ran a shelter
program, counseled survivors, trained advocates, police, judges and other
professionals, organized grassroots lobbying campaigns and testified before
the legislature, served on boards of directors and state and local
commissions relating to violence against women and children, and with the
Chief Justice of Oregon’s Supreme Court, she organized a statewide
multidisciplinary task force to address violence against women. The Oregon
Commission for Women recognized her as a “Woman of Achievement.” and the
Multnomah Bar Association granted her its Award of Merit. She lectures
widely and has authored numerous articles on human rights and justice.
Armatta returned to her home state of Oregon in 2012,
where she focuses on reform of the U.S. criminal justice system. She is
Board President of Oregon Advocates and Abuse Survivors in Service (an advocacy
organization for survivors of child sexual abuse) and Board President of
Oregon Voices (seeking a more productive response to sex crimes and those who
commit them), while also supporting the work of the Partnership for Safety and
Justice, the ACLU of Oregon, and the Oregon Justice Resource Center, which
oversees the Oregon Innocence Project and the Women’s Justice Project. She is
currently at work on a book about the U.S. criminal justice system and a memoir
of her years in the former Yugoslavia.