Ashley S. Kinseth

Ashley S. Kinseth is an international human rights lawyer and researcher working on genocide and atrocity prevention, forced displacement, and statelessness.

She first worked in Rakhine State, Myanmar, in 2013, and spent much of 2017 conducting field research there. In October of that year she argued in Al Jazeera English that the campaign against the Rohingya amounted to genocide. The UN Fact-Finding Mission reached that conclusion the following year; the United States adopted it in 2022.

Her work has followed the Rohingya across the region since—field research in the camps at Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh and in Rohingya settlements outside Delhi, documenting barriers to legal identity, freedom of movement, education, and healthcare. From 2018 to 2021 she founded and directed the Stateless Dignity Project, a US-registered nonprofit working in partnership with grassroots civil society organizations across South and Southeast Asia.

She has written on the evidentiary problem of proving genocidal intent—the question now before the International Court of Justice in The Gambia v. Myanmar—and is a member of the Genocide Experts Working Group convened by Genocide Watch. She has held positions with the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, The Carter Center, CARE International, and the International Senior Lawyers Project, spanning projects in more than fifteen countries. She has also conducted legal and policy work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

She holds a JD from Columbia Law School, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Human Rights Law Review, and an MA in International Policy Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. She works in English and French.

She is currently available for research, writing, consulting, and advisory engagements.