Ms. Kristina Touzenis is Head of the International Migration Law Unit at the International Organization for Migration where she is responsible for the activities related to international and regional law issues, both from an advocacy as well as an implementation point.

She has worked in the field of international law and migration for more than 12 years, focusing both on legal and policy development. She was with IOM’s Regional Office for the Mediterranean in Rome as programme coordinator/manager from 2006 till 2011 when she came to Geneva as head of the IML Unit and before that worked for Italian Institutions specifically on children and women’s rights issues. She has extensive experience teaching international law at both under- and post grad courses, mostly at Italian universities, including Roma III and Università di Trieste and Pisa and she has published widely on subjects regarding protection in international law – including a monography on children’s rights as well as on the inter-relation between human rights and transnational criminal law in the context of trafficking.

Ms Touzenis has experience in working on cross cutting legal issues in the context of migration, and while her work has been focusing a lot on human rights issues she has worked extensively on subjects of transnational criminal law and IHL. She has worked closely with a number of international organizations as well as CSO and academia to further the protection of individuals particularly in the migration context.