September 16, 2026Media Release, ProgramNeelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Fellow Spotlight: Senuri de Silva
We are excited to welcome the 2026 Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Fellow to Harvard Law School, where she will be hosted jointly with the Human Rights Program.
We are excited to welcome the 2026 Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Fellow, Senuri de Silva, who will spend the fall semester conducting research at Harvard Law School, hosted by the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World and the Human Rights Program. During her fellowship, her research will explore what an international criminal law lens reveals about the limits and possibilities of Sri Lanka’s domestic accountability framework for atrocity crimes.
Senuri comes to Harvard Law School from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where she is a doctoral researcher specializing in domestic and international criminal law, with a particular focus on domestic prosecutions of atrocity crimes in South Asia. She is a qualified Attorney-at-Law in Sri Lanka and holds an Advanced LLM in Public International Law from Leiden University (2021).
Before beginning her doctoral research, Senuri practiced law in Sri Lanka, including as State Counsel at the Attorney General’s Office, where she handled a range of civil and criminal matters. She later gained experience in international criminal law through work with the International Criminal Court and the International Bar Association. She has also taught international criminal law at the Leiden Summer School and Tilburg University and is an affiliated researcher with Joined Up Justice, a European Research Council-funded project at Tilburg University examining the development of coordinated approaches to global justice at the domestic level.
About the Neelan Tiruchelvam Fellowship
The Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Fellowship provides opportunities for outstanding legal scholars and practitioners of Sri Lankan background to undertake research, writing, and scholarly engagement on themes related to human rights in Sri Lanka and South Asia. The Fellowship is in honor of the late Neelan Tiruchelvam, a Sri Lankan peace and human rights activist, lawyer, scholar and politician.