Andréa J. Worden

Human rights advocate, lawyer, writer, translator

The experience of living, working and traveling in China in the late 1980s, and watching the joyous and hopeful weeks of April and May 1989 turn to despair on June 4, explains the backstory to many of the posts on this website, and indeed, much of my career. I’ve worked on issues related to human rights, rule of law and civil society in China in a variety of capacities, including at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), Yale Law School China Law Center, Asia Catalyst and the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT).

My more traditional legal career has included litigating at O’Melveny & Myers, LLP in Los Angeles and Washington, DC and serving on the Civil Appellate staff at the Department of Justice. I clerked for two wonderful judges in two beautiful mountainous states: Justice Robert L. Eastaugh (Alaska Supreme Court) and Judge Robert B. King, US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit (Charleston, WV). (When I got to West Virginia and saw “Mountain State” and “Wild, Wonderful” embossed on the license plates, my first thought was “y’all clearly haven’t been to Alaska.”)

I’ve had the pleasure of teaching some terrific students about the Chinese legal system at St. John’s University School of Law in NYC and American University’s Washington College of Law in DC. From 2018-2022, I was honored to serve as the William A. Reinsch Practitioner-Instructor in East Asian Studies at the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts & Sciences in Baltimore, where I taught a seminar each fall on timely topics relating to human rights in China, US policy, and after the pandemic emerged, global health and human rights, with a focus on Covid-19 case studies from Asia.

My research and writing centers on the Chinese government’s efforts to subvert and repurpose the international human rights system for its own ends. I also have a growing interest in the topic of sports and human rights, having written on the politics of sport in China, including Xi Jinping’s Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and the ongoing enforced disappearance and silencing of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai.