Bella Mosselmans, Director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council, La Grande Boissière 2012
Bella Mosselmans
La Grande Boissière, 2012
Director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council
New York City
Find out more about me:
If you are interested in finding out more about the Council’s work or how you can donate or help fundraise for it, please also do not hesitate to get in touch with me at [email protected] or you can donate immediately here.
I went to La Grande Boissière from eighth grade to eleventh grade. My dad then got a job with the World Food Programme, so we had to move in 2010. However, I missed LGB so much during my International Baccalaureate that I came back a few times to visit friends and would even still go to classes with them! The teachers would always welcome me back, and it felt like I had never left. I think that is one of the most beautiful things about international school. Everyone is so used to moving around, that you form extremely strong connections very quickly and those friendships then remain strong even when they eventually and inevitably become long-distance. I saw one of my friends from LGB for the first time in eight years over the summer, and it was like we had never been apart.
I went to the London School of Economics (LSE) for my undergraduate degree and then to law school. After law school, I worked for a human rights policy think-tank back in Geneva. While I found this very interesting, I quickly realized I wanted to work somewhere where I could more directly see the social impact of the work I was doing.
When I was 22, I started a job at an immigration & asylum law firm called Wesley Gryk in the UK, where I trained to be a lawyer. While working at Wesley Gryk, I co-founded a charity called Here for Good to provide free high-quality legal advice to European nationals and their family members to help them secure their immigration status in the UK. We were set up primarily to support those in financial hardship, the homeless, domestic violence and trafficking survivors, children in care, older persons and those with complex needs. Here for Good — unexpectedly and with the support of many colleagues — grew very quickly from a small team of volunteers to a fully fledged NGO which provides expert legal support to those in need and conducts strategic legal work across the UK. Over the past five years, our team has supported thousands of people in need to secure their immigration status in the UK and impacted the lives of tens of thousands through our strategic legal cases. We now also use our charity model to address other immigration crises in the UK and plug gaps in support, including for refugees fleeing Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Once I qualified as an immigration lawyer, I moved to work as an asylum and human rights lawyer at Safe Passage, a charity focusing on reuniting unaccompanied refugee children with their family members in Europe. I started in March 2020, days after the lockdown had been announced. Despite working remotely throughout the pandemic, I felt incredibly close to the Safe Passage team and the unbelievably strong and inspirational refugee children and young people we supported to reach safety and be reunited with their families. I continued to run Here for Good alongside this job.
In August 2021, I was extremely fortunate to be granted a full Kennedy Memorial Trust Scholarship to attend Harvard Law School and undertake a Masters in Law. This was one of the most amazing years of my life and grew my desire to continue to use the law as a tool for positive change and social impact. It also felt very much like LGB as my class was so international with students from over 60 countries.
Today I live in New York. I am the Director of a refugee & migrant rights organization called the Global Strategic Litigation Council (‘the Council’). We work to support civil society (local NGOs refugee leaders, lawyers, advocates) across the world to advance the rights of refugees and migrants through strategic litigation (legal cases that positively change law/policy) and legal advocacy. We have a growing network of over 350 NGOs, lawyers, advocates, refugee leaders and advocates in every region of the world. We empower these members to affect change through fostering knowledge-sharing and collaboration, running capacity-building training and directly supporting their litigation and advocacy efforts to ensure they have the greatest prospects of success.
The legal cases we support our network with, tend to be very high-impact cases that will change the law to protect and advance refugee and migrant rights. For example, we are working on cases to: ensure people in the Caribbean displaced by climate change have access to protection; to prevent Malaysia from sending refugees back to their country of origin where they would be at risk of persecution or harm; to ensure refugees in Kenya have a path to citizenship and can have freedom of movement; to ensure refugees in Colombia have the right to work and full access to social security. As Director, I primarily oversee all our legal work, hiring and fundraising. I am currently in the process of hiring expert regional litigators across the world to increase our support on such vital cases and grow our regional networks. The first three litigators will start in East Africa (Nairobi); Central America (Mexico City) and South Asia (New Delhi). It has been such an amazing experience to be able to work to build the organization and collaborate and learn from such inspirational lawyers, refugee leaders and activists across the world.
While working at the Council, I continue to support the new CEO we hired at Here for Good as a Senior Legal and Strategy Advisor. I also sit on the Board for Restless Development, an incredible youth-led advocacy agency that I first volunteered with when I was 19.
Other than work, I am an avid Chelsea football fan, and love cycling, music and dancing with friends!
Honestly, I cannot begin to express how much I think my time at Ecolint shaped my life today. It was such a privilege to be in an international environment with such amazing and creative minds at that age. I think it is a key reason I do and love what I do today. I know for certain that I would not be in the same place having not attended LGB. In particular, Global Awareness classes with Ms McKenzie opened my eyes to the atrocities occurring in the world and how we could use our careers to address them. It is difficult to explain how unique and important those classes were; and how much they opened my mind to the fundamental importance of helping and empowering others, and the notion that we are all one humanity, with one world.
My words of wisdom for Ecolint students:
I think I would say embrace every single moment - learn as much as you can from your teachers and classes but also importantly from your classmates around you and activities outside of class. Have confidence in your ability and power to make the world a better place. Do not lose that drive or ethos. Empower and encourage others around you to lead and fulfil their potential. Follow your dreams. Don’t worry too much about making mistakes or failure. Be kind. Stay in touch with friends when you graduate - many of them will be in your life forever.
What legacy do you want to leave?
I think since my Global Awareness classes at LGB, I have always been very conscious that life is a lottery. I was lucky enough to be born into a wonderful family, get an amazing education and live in safety. Due to structural and economic inequalities, war, persecution and climate change, most people across the world are not in this position. This inherent injustice is particularly at the forefront of many of our minds today, given the current humanitarian crisis and atrocities occurring in Gaza. It is therefore fundamentally important that those of us who are in positions of privilege, do everything in our power to support and create a society and a world that works for everyone, where everyone can live their lives freely, safely and in dignity. Where everyone can follow their dreams.
Being conscious of this, I have always been driven by a desire to use the opportunities given to me to support and empower others. I would like to continue to spend the rest of my life using my skills to create a positive impact in this world and to inspire others to do the same. I would like to continue to use the law and advocacy as a tool to effect change and tackle injustice. I would like to continue to demonstrate through my work at different organizations that leadership is most importantly about empowering others around you to lead with you.
I will write a more detailed piece about the work of the Council for LGB’s newsletter in May, so you can look out for that!