Melanie Clerc

Melanie Clerc has more than twenty years of professional experience working in the field of international human rights law and the rights of Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations. She is currently on Special Leave from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) where she has been working since 2005. She notably worked in the Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section and supported the Secretariats of the Working Group on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Working Group on the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. She was Coordinator and Secretary of the UN Voluntary Fund on Indigenous Peoples and UN Voluntary Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery and Project Officer for the UN Voluntary for Victims of Torture.  

She also worked with a number of Treaty Bodies and Special Procedures Mandate holders on slavery, trafficking, torture, extractive industries and business related issues.  In 2015, under the United Nations Sabbatical Leave Programme, she conducted a research project with a team of 8 graduate law students from the Indigenous Peoples’ Law and Policy Program on the implementation of recommendations from Treaty Bodies and Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples.  From 2003 to 2005, she worked as a Researcher for COVALENCE a Corporate Social Responsibility Company based in Switzerland where she documented human rights violations and abuses committed by Transnational Corporations. Earlier in her career, she worked in various human rights NGOs and Indigenous Organisations. Professor Clerc is working in her personal capacity with a group of students to conduct research on human rights violations of Indigenous Peoples perpetrated by Conservation actors. 

Copied from Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program.