Yukiho Semimoto

Yukiho Semimoto was born in Malaysia and grew up in Yokohama, Japan, and Westchester, New York. She then moved to D.C. to pursue her bachelor’s degree at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She graduated with a B.S. in Foreign Service in Regional Comparative Studies (Asia and the Middle East), with a Certificate in African Studies. During her time at Georgetown, she passed both language proficiency exams in French and Japanese, worked on DPRK counterproliferation efforts at an NGO, and studied abroad in a diplomacy program in Geneva, Switzerland, to further study international politics and French.

After graduating from Georgetown, Yukiho became a paralegal in the human rights practice at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll LLP, where she supported litigation on behalf of survivors of trafficking, forced labor, torture, extrajudicial killings, and other international human rights abuses. Her team’s work involved cases of human rights abuses that occurred abroad in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, litigating under domestic statutes such as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. This experience deepened her interest in litigation work and in the role that domestic courts could play in addressing human rights abuses committed abroad.

In her free time, Yukiho likes to paint, knit, explore restaurants in D.C., play the piano, and walk her dog.