Charu is the Founder and Executive Director of All Survivors Project. Charu sits on the Steering Board of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative in the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Development Office, as well as the Advisory Board of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self Determination at Princeton University. From 2004-2023. she was Associate Fellow in the Asia Pacific Program at Chatham House, where she covered political and human rights developments in South and South East Asia. She was also Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice for seven years till 2022.
Charu was Policy and Advocacy Director and previously Asia Program Manager at Child Soldiers International, formerly the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. She worked as the South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch until 2009 and documented violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in Nepal and Sri Lanka. Before joining Chatham House, Charu was an international journalist based in India, Sri Lanka and London writing for, among others, Far Eastern Economic Review, the BBC-South Asia Regional Unit, India Today and The Times of India. Charu has briefed UN member states on the human rights and political situation in Myanmar (Burma), Sri Lanka, Nepal and India at the Human Rights Council in Geneva; the UN Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict in New York; and the European Parliament in Brussels. She has conducted in-depth research on sexual violence in Sri Lanka and provided expert evidence to the UK Upper Tribunal Country Guidance case on Sri Lanka in 2013.
Charu received a Bachelor of Arts in History from Hindu College, University of Delhi and an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
