ILAC is delighted to welcome Nina Lahoud to ILAC’s Board of Directors. A longtime supporter and ILAC member, Nina will bring over three decades of expertise from the peacekeeping and legal development world, involving numerous United Nations assignments in conflict-affected countries, to our management team.
After leaving the law firm of Shearman & Sterling in 1983 to join the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon/UNIFIL (as the first woman Legal Adviser appointed to a mission), Nina served with the United Nations for over 33 years where she dealt extensively with legal, rule of law, peacekeeping, development and gender matters while serving in various offices at UN Headquarters and in six UN peacekeeping operations deployed in Lebanon, Namibia, Cambodia, Croatia, Kosovo and East Timor at critical historic junctures.
While working in the Office of Legal Affairs for over a decade, Nina handled diverse peacekeeping matters, and then transferred to the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in 1997 during a surge in peacekeeping activity worldwide. She assumed wide-ranging functions in DPKO, most recently (until August 2016) as Principal Officer to the Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, where she developed proposals for strengthening the gender architecture of multidimensional UN peacekeeping missions and the integration of gender expertise throughout mission planning and assessment processes, and also contributed submissions for the Independent Global Study on the Implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Among earlier assignments, she served as DPKO’s Deputy Director of the Asia and Middle East Division (and the Asia Integrated Operational Team Leader), Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, and Head of the Rule of Law Project where she spearheaded the establishment of the Secretary-General’s Executive Committee on Peace and Security “Task Force for Development of Comprehensive Rule of Law Strategies for Peace Operations” and headed its secretariat.
Nina also undertook a number of special assignments with other UN entities, including as Principal Officer to the Special Adviser of the Secretary-General on Iraq, Special Gender Adviser to the Under-Secretary-General of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (where she co-chaired a Working Group on Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women comprising 23 UN regional entities), and Special Adviser to the Executive Director of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) on Peace and Security and Rule of Law Programmes (where she led the organization, in partnership with ILAC, of two international conferences on gender justice in post-conflict situations).
During special leave from the UN, Nina served as a 2013 Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and then as a 2014 Senior Fellow. During the fellowship, she developed a pilot project to establish a “Gender Justice Leadership Pathway Initiative” to support women legal and judicial professionals from conflict-affected countries, and launched the pilot phase of the Initiative’s “Network of Gender Justice Mentors and Peers”. She holds a Juris Doctorate (J.D.) and a Certificate in Islamic Law from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a B.A. from Harvard University.
Nina is a member of various professional legal organizations, and serves on the Board of Directors of “Empowerment Through Integration” an NGO that focuses on the empowerment and inclusion of visually-impaired youth in Lebanon (and the region) to become change-makers in their society.
