Ms. Alexandra Guáqueta, Former member of the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises

Alexandra Guáqueta (D.Phil. International Relations, Oxford) is an Adjunct Lecturer at the School of International Studies at Flinders Universityand has worked for over a decade on business and human rights, peace-building, Latin American regional security, drug trafficking, and democratic norms diffusion. She was Academic Director of Fundación Ideas para la Paz (2004-2008) where she created the Business and Conflict Program. She facilitated with the IBLF the “Dialogue on Business, Peace, Development and Human Rights” that led to the “Colombian Guidelines on Security and Human Rights” code and multi-stakeholder process. She piloted International Alert’s Conflict-Sensitive Business Practice tool for extractive industries with Oxy and Cerrejón (2005) and co-chaired the Secretariat of the Colombian Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights in-country process (2006-2008). She worked for Oxy (2002-2004) on the implementation of new human rights standards and was Social Standards and International Engagement Head at Cerrejón (2008-2011) focusing on social standards, local and international stakeholder engagement, labour rights, and indigenous peoples’ rights. At Cerrejón she road-test the operational-level grievance mechanism effectiveness criteria proposed by the Ruggie mandate. She was Senior Associate of the Economic Agendas in Civil Wars Program of the International Peace Institute (2001-2002) and Coordinator of the Regional Security Cooperation Program of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung-Colombia (2004-2008). Ms. Guáqueta serves in the High-Level Advisory Committee of the European Commission’s Sectoral Guidelines on business and human rights project, the Board of Trustees of Shift, the World Economic Forum’s Council on Human Rights and Better Coal’s Stakeholder Advisory Committee. She has authored more than 30 academic and policy publications.