Claret Vargas is the executive director of the Stanford Human Rights Center. Claret joined the Center from Boston, where she worked on employee-side class action litigation and authored several state and federal appellate briefs, including briefs presented to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Her experience in human rights includes extensive work in Alien Tort Statute litigation, report writing based on archival research and on-site missions, international human rights litigation, and transitional justice.

Her research and advocacy focus on human rights, social justice, ethics, and violence. As a scholar with regional expertise in Latin America, Claret has researched, published and taught on indigenous rights movements in Guatemala and Bolivia, ethics in Brazilian and Latin American literature, public intellectuals’ human rights advocacy during and after dictatorships in the Americas, and on the influence of Spanish Colonialism and the development of International Humanitarian Law and Just War theory.

Claret earned her Ph.D. in Latin American and Brazilian literature from Harvard University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. While in law school, she worked with Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic, its War Crimes Prosecution Clinic, and researched comparative and international law. She clerked for the Honorable Mark L. Wolf, former Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She has also worked with the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) in Argentina and was a legal fellow at the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA).

Claret is originally from La Paz, Bolivia. She is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, French and English, and has a basic knowledge of Quechua. Before attending law school, she was assistant professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami.