Katherine C. Hall, J.D.
Kathy Hall is the deputy director of women and population at the United Nations Foundation. She is a human rights lawyer with over a decade of experience developing and executing programming and advocacy strategies to advance women’s reproductive and sexual health and rights.
From 1996 to 2005, Ms. Hall helped build and ultimately directed the International Legal Program of the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, where she developed the Center’s UN advocacy work and expanded the Center’s programs in Latin America, Africa, East Central Europe and Asia.
While she was at the Center, Ms. Hall’s program worked on legal and policy reform in collaboration with local women’s rights organizations. The program also tackled numerous reproductive rights violations, such as inadequate access to reproductive health services in Guatemala and Zimbabwe, of restrictive abortion laws in Chile, El Salvador and Nepal, and of coercive family planning practices in Slovakia and Peru. During her tenure, the Center developed a reproductive rights litigation strategy that included filing cases in regional and international human rights bodies related to Mexico, Peru, Poland and Slovakia. She also oversaw the Center’s U.S. foreign policy work, including its response to the Bush Administration’s Global Gag Rule. She has co-authored numerous publications and has been a frequent speaker at conferences and hearings.
For two years prior to joining the Foundation, Ms. Hall was co-executive director of Just Detention International in Los Angeles, a human rights organization that seeks to end sexual abuse in all forms of detention.
Ms. Hall is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University School of Law. She practiced law in Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh for several years and was a law clerk to a federal district court judge in New York. She is vice chair of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), a human rights and social justice organization based in Boston. Ms. Hall is fluent in Spanish.
