Sonia Bezziccheri

Area of Expertise:

• Health, Doctors, Nurses, HIV/AIDS
• Human Rights, Law, Migration, Conflicts, Justice
• Infrastructure, Technology, Engineering, Science
• Monitoring, Evaluation, Policy, Research, Analysis

Professional Experience:

More than twenty years of solid international work experience including with Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontiers - MSF) in Angola, as coordinator of a nutrition project; with Amnesty International in San Francisco, USA, as project coordinator for the international campaign against the death penalty and other human rights issues in Colombia; with the Conflict Prevention Network (a European Union funded project in Brussels) as project coordinator; with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Regional Centre in Bangkok, Thailand; and in Cambodia working on HIV/AIDS and drug use issues and on human rights at regional level.

With the UNODC, I was focal point for human rights and drug use/HIV, especially related to the issue of the compulsory centres for drug users in South East Asia; a topic/debate that I contributed to bring forward through extensive international advocacy at major international fora and strategic planning including in close collaboration with HRW as well as other NGOs and key stakeholders.

I have two Masters Degrees in International Conflict Analysis (University of Canterbury, UK) and in Intercultural Management (ICHEC Business School, Brussels). It is through this last Master’s degree that I spent 7 months in Medellin, Colombia, lecturing on conflict theory at University of EAFIT and closely working with municipal government on urban guerrillas’ issues in this city. As a result of this experience, I wrote documents on the Colombia conflict titled: Colombia 2000: Either Coca or Peace! I have additionally completed two internships with the European Union “Drugs” and “Colombia Desks” as well as with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Brussels. And just recently I have acquired a three-year bachelor degree in Sciences of Linguistic Mediation - Criminology and Intelligence focusing on White Collar Crime: analysis of tactics and consequences which was published in a book.