Director, International Legal Consortium, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids – USA

Patricia Lambert is a South African human rights lawyer and social justice advocate currently working as the Director of the International Legal Consortium (ILC) at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington, DC – part of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use.

Since January 2007, the ILC has assisted almost 80 countries to draft or revise their tobacco control legislation and is currently assisting several countries to defend their tobacco control measures in courts of law. In addition, the ILC has created and maintains the world’s first searchable on-line database for law and tobacco control, tobaccocontrollaws.org. The database currently contains legislation from 196 countries, in-depth analysis of laws from 74 countries as well as almost 1,000 court decisions from around the world.

For ten years, during the Mandela and Mbeki administrations, Patricia worked as a legal adviser to the South African government on a range of human rights, trade, environmental and health issues. Working within the Ministry of Health, she was the Chief Negotiator for the government on two major international law initiatives: the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the world’s first public health treaty, and the International Health Regulations. Patricia also assisted the government in its historic legal battle with the multinational pharmaceutical industry over South Africa’s groundbreaking laws aimed at providing affordable medicines.

In addition to serving on the INWAT Board, Patricia currently serves on the Boards of Action on Smoking or Health (ASH-US) and the African Tobacco Control Alliance (ATCA). She is a past Board member of the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA).