Carmen Johns is a former journalist, and former political affairs officer at the UN for 15 years. She has worked in radio broadcasting in Santiago, Chile, often covering human rights violations during the Pinochet regime, and various newspapers and other publications, as well as freelance for the BBC World Service, the French news agency AFP, in Santiago and later Paris; and contributed to the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York, now part of Human Rights Watch. In 1979 she won the UN Correspondents Association Fellowship, and a British Council Scholarship, earning a Master’s degree, in 1990. Ms Johns was born in New York, of Chilean parents, and has lived in the US, Geneva, Santiago, the UK and Western Sahara, including Tindouf, Algeria, as a political officer of MINURSO. She retired in 2016 and lives in New York.