Ms. Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona, former Special Rapporteur (2008-2014)

Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (formerly Independent Expert) between May 2008 and June 2014.

Ms. Sepúlveda is a Chilean lawyer who holds a Ph.D in International Human Rights Law from Utrecht University in the Netherlands; an LL.M in human rights law from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom and a post graduate diploma in comparative law from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Ms. Sepúlveda has worked as a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, as a staff attorney at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and as the Co-Director of the Department of International Law and Human Rights of the United Nations-mandated University for Peace in San Jose, Costa Rica. She also served as a consultant to the Division of International Protection of UNHCR and to the Norwegian Refugee Council in Colombia. More recently she was Research Director at the International Council on Human Rights Policy in Geneva and Associate Research Fellow at the Norwegian Center for Human Rights.

She was appointed Independent Expert on the question of human rights and extreme poverty by the Human Rights Council in March 2008 and assumed her functions on 1 May of that year. In June 2011 the Human Rights Council extended the mandate on extreme poverty and human rights, and changed its title to Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (HRC resolution 17/13).

Previous issues in focus

Listed below are the reports produced by Ms. Sepúlveda in her roles as Independent Expert and Special Rapporteur for extreme poverty from 2008 to 2013.