Martina E. Vandenberg

Martina E. Vandenberg is the founder and president of The Human
Trafficking Legal Center, which she established in 2012. For more than two
decades, Vandenberg has worked to fight human trafficking, forced labor,
rape as a war crime, and violence against women. Vandenberg has
represented victims of human trafficking pro bono in immigration, criminal,
and civil cases. She has obtained T-visas for trafficking survivors and won
significant civil judgments in federal trafficking cases. Vandenberg has
trained more than 5,000 pro bono attorneys nationwide to handle human
trafficking matters. She provides technical assistance and mentoring to legal
teams handling trafficking cases in U.S. federal courts.

Vandenberg has also testified before multiple House and Senate Committees
on issues ranging from human trafficking and peacekeeping to forced labor
in global supply chains. She gave the keynote address at the first NATO
ambassadorial-level conference on human trafficking in Brussels, and has
worked to combat trafficking of third country nationals onto U.S. military
bases for forced labor. Her work has been cited in The Washington Post, the
New York Times, the New Yorker, NPR, CNN, and the BBC. She previously
co-chaired the International Bar Association’s Presidential Task Force on
Human Trafficking.

A former Human Rights Watch researcher, Vandenberg spearheaded
investigations into human rights violations and war crimes. She conducted
HRW investigations in the Russian Federation, Bosnia & Herzegovina,
Uzbekistan, Kosovo, and Ukraine. She is the author of two Human Rights
Watch reports, “Hopes Betrayed: Trafficking of Women and Girls to Post-
Conflict Bosnia & Herzegovina for Forced Prostitution,” and “Kosovo: Rape
as a Weapon of ‘Ethnic Cleansing.’” As a researcher for the Israel Women’s
Network, she investigated and published the first report documenting human
trafficking into Israel. While living in the Russian Federation in the 1990s,
she co-founded Syostri, one of Russia’s first rape crisis centers for women.

Vandenberg previously served as a partner at Jenner & Block LLP, where
she focused on complex commercial litigation and anti-bribery
investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. She served as a senior member of the firm’s Pro Bono Committee and handled multiple human trafficking matters pro bono while at the firm.

Vandenberg has received multiple awards for her leadership against human
trafficking. In 2025, Vandenberg received the American Bar Association’s
John Minor Wisdom Public Service and Professionalism Award. In 2012,
the Freedom Network USA presented Vandenberg with the Paul and Sheila
Wellstone Award for her “outstanding leadership and dedication in working
to combat human trafficking and slavery in the United States.” In 2013, she
received the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation’s Stevens Award for
outstanding service in public interest law. In 2015, she received the
Katharine & George Alexander Law Prize. She also received Albert E.
Jenner, Jr. Pro Bono Award for her successful representation of trafficking
victims in United States federal courts and her advocacy before Congress. In
2020, Vandenberg received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater,
Pomona College. In 2021, she received the Blaisdell Award, Pomona
College’s highest honor for alumni of the college.

Vandenberg is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Rhodes
Scholar and Truman Scholar. Vandenberg has taught as an adjunct faculty
member at the American University Washington College of Law and at the
Oxford University Human Rights Law Summer Program. She is a graduate
of Pomona College (B.A.), Oxford University (M.Phil), and Columbia Law
School (J.D.).