Berkley Center

Pascale Esho Warda is the president of the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, which won the U.S. Department of State's 2012 Human Rights Defenders Award. She was the minister of migration and displacement in the Iraqi Interim Government and one of only six women in the 32-member interim Iraqi Council of Ministers, which operated following the transfer of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004. A Chaldean Catholic and ethnic Assyrian, she was born in Dahuk but later exiled to France; there and later in Syria she worked with the Assyrian Democratic Movement. After returning to Iraq in 2001, Warda served for three years as the head of the Assyrian Women's Union. She has also served as external affairs manager for the Assyrian Aid Society-Iraq and co-founded the Iraqi Women's Center for Development in Baghdad. Warda holds an M.A. in human rights studies from the Catholic University of Lyon.