Ms. Lahoud, a lawyer and gender justice advocate with more than four decades of diverse international work experience, has dedicated most of her career to providing support to conflict-affected populations across the globe. She left the law firm of Shearman & Sterling to join the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in 1983 as the first female Legal Adviser ever appointed to a peacekeeping mission. Over her 33-year UN career, she served in senior roles in various departments at UN Headquarters, a UN Regional Commission, and in six UN peacekeeping missions in Lebanon, Namibia, Cambodia, Croatia, Kosovo, and East Timor, during which she handled legal, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, human rights, and gender justice matters.
Before moving to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in 1997, she spent a decade in the UN Office of Legal Affairs. During her two decades in DPKO, she assumed wide-ranging functions, including as Principal Officer to the Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping. In this capacity, she developed proposals for strengthening the gender architecture of UN peacekeeping missions and the integration of gender expertise in mission planning and assessment processes. As a member of the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee on Women, Peace, and Security, she shared these proposals with the 2015 High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations and the Independent Global Study on the Implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security.
Earlier, she served as DPKO’s Deputy Director of the Asia and Middle East Division, Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, and Head of the Rule of Law Project. She spearheaded the UN Secretary-General’s Executive Committee Task Force for the Development of Comprehensive Rule of Law Strategies for Peace Operations, and served as a member and secretariat head. She also held senior positions with other UN entities, including as Principal Officer to the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Iraq, Gender Adviser to the Under-Secretary-General of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, and Special Peace, Security, and Rule of Law Adviser to the Executive Director of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). On UNIFEM’s behalf, she led the organization of two international conferences on gender justice in post-conflict situations, with the ground-breaking reports submitted to and issued as documents of the UN Security Council.
Currently, Ms. Lahoud serves on the Global Leadership Council of Seeds of Peace, the Advisory Board of PassBlue, and the Board of the International Center for Transitional Justice, and recently completed a six-year term on the Board of the International Legal Assistance Consortium. In addition, she is a member of Diplomats Without Borders and of various national and international legal and foreign policy organizations, and is actively involved in gender justice and women’s empowerment networks. Appointed by the Office of the UN Secretary-General in December 2018, she has also served as a member of the Advisory Group to the UN High-Level Task Force on Financing for Gender Equality, which culminated in the Secretary-General’s approval of its report and implementation plan in 2020. A leading advocate for the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda set out in landmark UN Security Council resolution 1325 (2000), Ms. Lahoud published, in advance of its 20th anniversary, an article in the Journal of International Peacekeeping that presented recommendations for accelerating implementation of its commitments and those of its successor resolutions (see JOUP 24(2020)1-52). She has been an invited speaker at high-level international conferences, including at the “Forum on Advancing Women, Peace and Security in Yemen” held in April 2024 in Madrid and the “International Conference for Women, Peace and Security” held in September 2022 in Abu Dhabi.
In 2013, Ms. Lahoud was selected as a Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) Fellow (among 33 worldwide) and then as a 2014 Senior Fellow. She developed and piloted a project establishing a “Network of Gender Justice Mentors and Peers” involving women lawyers and judges in Timor-Leste and their counterparts in other countries, and remains active in the Harvard ALI Coalition. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University, and a Juris Doctorate and a Certificate in Islamic Law from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
