Joanna Ewart-James

Executive Director

Joanna is co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of Freedom United, guiding and mobilising our community members to power up the global anti-slavery effort and drive real change. Joanna is also a trustee at Labour Behind the Label Trust - campaigning for workers’ rights in the clothing industry. At the end of 2021 she completed her term as Chair of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative UK, during which she received an innovation award for the newly created Commonwealth 8.7 Network on modern slavery. Joanna was previously with Walk Free and Anti-Slavery International, where she developed and directed their work on business engagement, leading the Cotton Campaign in Europe. Joanna is a contributing author to books including Vulnerability, exploitation and migrants: Insecure work in a globalised economy (Palgrave, 2015), and The SAGE Handbook of Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery. (SAGE, 2018). Her international human rights experience spans the UK diplomatic service, academia, and philanthropy, managing multi-million dollar budgets. Joanna holds a Masters in Understanding and Securing Human Rights from the University of London.