Mariana Katzarova

Ms. Mariana Katzarova (Bulgaria) was appointed as Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation by the United Nations Human Rights Council on 4 April 2023. She officially assumed her function on 1 May 2023. The Special Rapporteur presented her first report in September 2023 to the 54th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva and addressed the 78th Session of the UN General Assembly on 25th October 2023 in New York.

Between 2021 and 2022, Ms. Katzarova led the examination team of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, established pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 46/20 to support the High Commissioner to monitor and report on the situation of human rights in Belarus in the context of the 2020 presidential election.

In 2014-2016, during the first two years of the armed conflict in Ukraine, Ms. Katzarova led the Human Rights Monitoring Mission team in Donbas as head of the regional office in Eastern Ukraine.

For a decade she headed the Amnesty International investigations of human rights in Russia and the two Chechnya conflicts. With the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, she focused on the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Ms. Katzarova founded RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in War) in 2006 after working as a journalist and human rights investigator in the war zones of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo (United Nations Security Council resolution 1244) and Chechnya. At RAW, she established the annual Anna Politkovskaya Award for women human rights defenders working in war and conflict zones.

She was Advisor to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on combating human trafficking, and a senior advisor at the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).