Christen Broecker

Christen Broecker is Director of AJC’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights and spearheads its work to promote greater respect for universal human rights worldwide.

Christen joined JBI in 2010 and was its Deputy Director from 2016-2024. She has collaborated with several independent United Nations experts and bodies focused on country situations where widespread rights violations are occurring and on key thematic issues including preventing genocide, defending religious freedom, combating religious intolerance, and combating torture. She is a lead author of a UN policy paper on combating Holocaust denial and genocide denial and a manual on human rights and prevention of genocide produced by JBI in cooperation with the Office of the UN Special Adviser on Prevention of Genocide. She has successfully urged social media companies to apply their content moderation policies consistently and to remove harmful online content including Holocaust denial in line with human rights standards. She has overseen the publication of JBI reports tracking rising global antisemitism as a human rights concern and widespread rights violations in countries including Iran, Ukraine, and Sudan. She is the author of numerous publications on U.S. foreign policy and human rights and UN human rights mechanisms and is co-editor, with former JBI Director Felice Gaer, of The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: Conscience for the World (2013).

Before coming to AJC, Broecker was the NYU Fellow at Human Rights Watch where she focused on Indonesia. She received B.A. from the University of North Carolina in Peace, War, and Defense and International Studies; and a J.D. and an LL.M in International Legal Studies from New York University, where she was an Institute for International Law and Justice Scholar.