Rebecca Brown

President and CEO

Rebecca Brown is the President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), leading the organization to accomplish its mission of using the power of law to protect the environment, promote human rights, and ensure a just and sustainable society. 

Rebecca is a human rights lawyer with over 20 years’ experience working to advance socio-economic rights, gender equality, and climate justice. Most recently, Rebecca served as Vice President, Global Advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Under her leadership, the organization successfully built international human rights law and global political standards to explicitly recognize reproductive rights as fundamental human rights. In this role, Rebecca was a pioneer of the organization’s external engagement strategy and successfully built a range of strategic partnerships with governments, philanthropy, and civil society organizations. Rebecca also played a key role in the creation of the global strategy of the organization and conceptualized and developed new programmatic areas of work including on protecting reproductive rights in humanitarian settings and on countering anti-rights movements.  

Prior to joining the Center for Reproductive Rights, Rebecca served in a range of progressively responsible roles at the International Network on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net), including as Deputy Director where she oversaw all the programmatic areas of the Network, including the Corporate Accountability and Social Movements Working Groups. Prior to that, Rebecca led the Strategic Litigation and Women’s Economic and Social Rights Working Groups, where she successfully coordinated joint legal strategies on cases dealing with access to water, housing, health, and corporate impacts on the environment.   

Rebecca first found herself focused on environmental protection with a fellowship at the Women’s Environment and Development Organization in her early 20’s. This experience provided crucial exposure to interconnected and interdependent ways that environmental degradation and climate impacts also often lay at the heart of gender inequalities and human rights violations. It laid a foundation for the focus of her passion as an advocate and the trajectory of her career as a human rights lawyer. Rebecca then went on to serve as the Environmental Justice Associate at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, where Rebecca collaborated directly with communities around the world in designing their own solutions to environmental and climate impacts and utilizing strategic litigation and legal advocacy as a core part of their strategy.  

Rebecca holds a JD from the City University of New York, School of Law and BA from Hunter College. Rebecca is widely published on a range of issues including analysis of current humanitarian and human rights legal obligations, equality and discrimination, reproductive rights, and access to water. 

Rebecca lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and son and spends her free time hiking and swimming in the beautiful natural environment that surrounds them. 

Rebecca may be contacted at rbrown@ciel.org.