Bio
Eileen Donahoe is a distinguished fellow at CIGI, where she contributes expertise on internet governance, global digital policy, international human rights and cyber security. Eileen also sat as a commissioner on the Global Commission on Internet Governance.
Previously, she served as the first US ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, and as director of global affairs at Human Rights Watch, where she represented the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy, with special emphasis on digital rights, security and governance.
Eileen is a member of the Freedom Online Coalition working group on freedom and security focused on bringing a human rights-based approach to cyber security policy. She is a member of the World Economic Forum Council on the Future of Human Rights and a member of the University of Essex Advisory Board on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology. She co-chaired the NETmundial Initiative on global multi-stakeholder internet governance. She is an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a member of the board of trustees at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, where she collaborates on a project working to bring the deliberative democracy to internet governance processes. In her earlier career, Eileen was a technology litigator at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley.
She holds a B.A. from Dartmouth, an M.T.S. from Harvard, an M.A. in East Asian studies from Stanford, a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in ethics and social theory from the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.