Kristine Beckerle

Kristine Beckerle is a lawyer, researcher, human rights activist and writer focused on human rights and humanitarian law questions in the contemporary Middle East. Beckerle is currently serving as the inaugural, regional socio-economic rights advisor for Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division, focusing on economic justice, and the intersections between conflict, the climate crisis, extraction and socio-economic rights violations in the region. Between 2021 and 2023, Beckerle was the Cover-Lowenstein Fellow at the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights and a Clinical Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, researching, writing and reaching on human rights abuses during conflict, with a particular focus on reparations for mass violations.

Beckerle has over a decade of experience working on human rights issues in the Middle East. Most recently, Beckerle served as acting deputy director in Human Rights Watch's MENA division, working with the Yemen, Gulf and Iran teams. Before Yale, Beckerle was the Legal Director of Accountability and Redress for Mwatana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni rights organization. Beckerle built and led the team that expanded Mwatana’s portfolio of international legal action, including against weapons companies and state actors, built cross-cutting partnerships with lawyers, litigation organizations and civil society groups, and developed Mwatana’s organizational research, legal and advocacy capacity. Before Mwatana, Beckerle worked as a researcher for Human Rights Watch, where she led investigations into rights abuses during the Yemen conflict and led the organization's global Yemen response. She also researched rights abuses in other Gulf countries, including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. As Finberg Fellow at Human Rights Watch, Beckerle researched, wrote and partnered with Saudi women's rights activists to launch a report on Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system. Before law school, Beckerle worked with the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees on issues related to gender-based violence and international protection in Amman, Jordan. Beckerle earned her J.D. from Yale Law School and her A.B from Harvard University, where she studied Social Studies and the Arabic language.