Elsa served as lead legal advisor for TRIAL International’s program in the Democratic Republic of Congo from September 2015 until she became Legal Coordinator for the Ukraine program in 2024.
She oversees the strategic litigation work on Ukraine, where tools like extraterritorial jurisdiction is used to create a web of accountability against high-level suspects responsible for the crimes committed in Ukraine, but also in other conflicts following similar patterns of attacks on civilians. Through her work in the DRC and Ukraine, she has helped national authorities and local actors in their investigations and prosecutions of mass atrocities. She also helped secured key convictions against former warlords like Sheka and in the infamous Kavumu case, where TRIAL’s team worked alongside the Nobel Peace Prize Denis Mukwege.
Elsa holds an LLM in international law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva (Switzerland), a master’s degree in transnational law, as well as a law degree obtained in Quebec (Canada). A qualified lawyer in Quebec, she practiced criminal law in legal aid cases and worked alongside the E-Team at Human Right Watch.