People

Senuri de Silva is a doctoral researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, specialising in domestic and international criminal law. She is a qualified Attorney-at-Law in Sri Lanka and holds an Advanced LLM in Public International Law from Leiden University (2021). 

She has worked as Legal Associate in the Chambers of Mr. Geoffrey Alagaratnam, PC (2017) and as a State Counsel at the Attorney General’s Office of Sri Lanka (2018–2020). During her time in both private practice and the public sector in Sri Lanka, Senuri handled a wide range of civil and criminal matters, from fundamental rights applications before the Supreme Court to appearing as prosecuting counsel in numerous criminal trials across several High Courts in Sri Lanka. Following her studies in the Netherlands, she gained further experience as an international criminal lawyer, as a Visiting Professional in Chambers at the International Criminal Court (2021), where she assisted with evaluating evidence and drafting the Pre-Trial Chamber’s confirmation of charges decision in the case of Mahamat Said Abdel-Kani, and as an intern at the International Bar Association (2022), where she monitored several key international criminal trials before the ICC, the KSC, and the MICT. Senuri has also taught on international criminal law at the Leiden Summer School (2023, 2024, 2025) and in the Global Law Bachelor’s Programme at Tilburg University, and has served both as a Judge and as a Moot Court Coach for Tilburg University at several editions of the ICC-IBA Moot Court Competition in Leiden. She is also an affiliated researcher of Joined Up Justice at Tilburg University, which is a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant) aimed at developing parameters for a coordinated system of global justice at the domestic level. 

In 2026, Senuri joins Harvard Law School as the Neelan Tiruchelvam Fellow, hosted by the Human Rights Program and the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. Her doctoral research focuses on domestic prosecutions for atrocity crimes in South Asia. During the fellowship, her research will ask what an international criminal law lens reveals about the limits and possibilities of Sri Lanka’s domestic accountability framework for atrocity crimes.