Caterina Ventura is an international lawyer with extensive experience in a range of political, economic and human rights issues, at The Hague, in the United Nations, Human Rights and Economic Law Division, in the Canadian Human Rights Commission, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission. She served in Global Affairs Canada in a variety of positions from 1999 to 2021, recently as High Commissioner to Brunei, where she was responsible for country policy and programming coherence on trade, political and public affairs, consular and administration.

As Senior Adviser, Partnerships for Development Innovation Branch, she was engaged in the development of the Department’s Innovation for Development policy and led its implementation through connecting social impact entrepreneurs with investors in order to provide needed goods and services to countries in development.

While representing the Government of Canada at the United Nations, she formulated political strategies and advanced and promoted Canadian policies, priorities and interests on the Middle-East, Asia, counter-terrorism, and sanctions. She facilitated collaboration among the UN Secretariat, member states and stakeholders to advance common objectives, participated in and chaired negotiations and provided the Government with timely, quality reporting and analysis on high profile, often controversial Security Council and General Assembly issues including Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Israel/Palestine.

She was instrumental in facilitating the Canadian Government’s sponsorship of the first UN system-wide training on sanctions monitoring and implementation,
implemented by CCSI in 2012-2013