Laura Cristina Dib is the Venezuela Program Director at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). Prior to joining WOLA, Laura was the Director of the Legal Clinic for Migrants and a member of the Migration Studies Center at University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia. There she worked on the defense of migrants and refugee’s rights through the design of litigation strategies and advocacy efforts. Her areas of interest and experience are transitional justice, migration and human rights.
Laura is a lawyer and holds a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Studies from the Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas, Venezuela. She also has an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Laura started her career defending students being arbitrarily detained in peaceful demonstrations in Venezuela and then became a part of Consultores Jurídicos in Caracas, a law firm where she participated in the litigation before the Inter-American and International Human Rights Systems in cases concerning the violation of the rights to freedom of speech, personal integrity, due process, personal freedom and political participation. She was also a research assistant in the project “Constitutional Justice in Times of Transition” at the University of the Andes (Bogotá, Colombia).
She is the author and co-author of several articles, book chapters and interventions before the Colombian Constitutional Court on migration and human rights, as well as on issues related to transitional justice.