Elsa is a criminal defence lawyer called to the bar in British Columbia and an international criminal law practitioner based across Vancouver, The Hague, and London. She is counsel with Kate Gibson for Prosper Mugiraneza at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. She is a partner at Arendt Chambers in Vancouver and an Associate Member of Church Court Chambers in London, and is mentored by Lewis Power KC of Furnival Chambers.
Elsa has co-chaired the IBA War Crimes Committee’s flagship conference at The Hague (Masters of War 2026 and Law on the Frontlines 2025) and serves as Events Officer for the Committee. She is a memorials evaluator and judge for the IBA/ICC Moot Court Competition, a member of the Bar Issues Committee Crimes Against Humanity Convention Working Group, and recently participated in Chatham House dialogue on AI and atrocity prevention.
She supports the IBA/USAID Ukraine Defence Counsel Training Project and consulted on the IHL/ICL training manual for Ukrainian defence counsel. At Columbia University, she contributed research to the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom. Recent scholarship includes “Legitimacy Foreclosed? The De-Hybridization of the October 7 Special Court and Lessons of the Iraqi High Tribunal” (with Kate McInnes, Opinio Juris, 2026).
In British Columbia, Elsa appears regularly in the BC Supreme Court and Provincial Court in serious criminal matters including murder and sexual offences. She has appeared at the Supreme Court of Canada as intervenor counsel for the Trial Lawyers Association of BC on sentencing fairness to Indigenous and marginalised communities (R v Nahanee, 2022 SCC 37). She also practises as complainant counsel in sexual offence proceedings and acts in human rights matters. She supervises the UBC Law Innocence Project. She holds an LLM from Columbia University (Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, Davis Polk Leadership Grant), an LLB (First Class Honours, top of class in Advanced Criminal Law) from the University of Otago, and an MA (Distinction) in International Law and Security from the University of Birmingham.
Before entering law school , Elsa managed returnee camps and reintegrated demobilized soldiers in post-genocide Rwanda for the UNDP, restructured HIV/AIDS programmes in Cameroon, researched defence and security policy at NORAD and the Hudson Institute, and wrote on the psychology of why ordinary people commit atrocities.
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