Nelson Camilo Sánchez León

Nelson Camilo Sánchez joined the UVA Law faculty in 2018 as director of the International Human Rights Clinic. He has worked as a consultant and legal expert on different human rights issues for academic, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations.

He is formerly research director of the Center for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia) and associate professor of law at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota. Before joining Dejusticia in 2008, Sánchez served with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Colombian Commission of Jurists.

Sánchez has also been a visiting professor at UVA and the University of Essex, as well as an adjunct lecturer at Universidad Javeriana de Cali and Universidad de Los Andes.

He has published eight books, including most recently, in 2017, “Land in Transition: Transitional Justice, Land Restitution and Agrarian Reform in Colombia,” “Land and Ethnic Territories Restitution: Justifications, Dilemas and Strategies” and “Debates on the Land Restitution Law.”

His teaching interests include transitional justice, international human rights law, corporate responsibility for human rights violations during conflicts, inter-American human rights system, and economic, social and cultural rights.

Sánchez has been a regular contributor to the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, and writes editorials for Open democracy and Global Rights blogs, Americas Quarterly and the Due Process of Law Foundation Blog. A number of these articles have been translated from Spanish or English into French, Portuguese, German, Turkish and Arabic.