Gen A: Roundtable With Anusooya Sivaganesan

For our second Gen A roundtable in 2023, we are sitting down with Anusooya Sivaganesan, Director of the Swiss Center of Competence Against Forced Marriage (Fachstelle Zwangsheirat) and Chair of the
Migration & Human Rights organisation.

Join us for this exclusive conversation and bring your own questions to the table.

Anusooya Sivaganesan, born 1987 in Sri Lanka and living in Zug and Zurich (Switzerland), graduated from the University of Zurich with a Master of Law. Currently, she is finalizing her research project "Forced to marry. A human rights violation within its Euro-Asian entanglements. Unfree marriages from a multi-country perspective exemplified by Switzerland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkey". For her interdisciplinary research, she carried out her field work in more than these six countries, conducting interviews with various experts, scholars, activists and state authorities. In 2015, she received the van Calker scholarship at the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law in Lausanne, focusing on international family law. From December 2015 to February 2016, she was a visiting PhD student at the Department of Sociology at the University of San Diego (UCSD) and subsequently got the grant for a visiting PhD fellowship at the Erasmus Graduate School of Law in Rotterdam. To round up the experience, she obtained a visiting PhD fellowship at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford in 2017. Next to her academic work, she is the director of the Swiss Center of Competence Against Forced Marriage (Fachstelle Zwangsheirat) and chairs the organisation Migration & Human Rights on a voluntary basis. In addition, she is also a member of the Federal Commission on Migration (FCM) and Federal Commission for Women’s Issues (FCWI).

Resources and Preparation Material  

• Was tun gegen Zwangsehen, Anu Sivaganesan? Podcast Kultur-Talk des SRF (14. Dezember, 2022). (in German) More
• Western Wrangling with Forced Marriage: A Human Rights Violation and its Janus-faced Criminalisation. In: Hypotheses, 2015. More
• Best of «Sternstunden»: Zwangsheirat in der Schweiz. SRF, 2014 (in German). More
• Bekämpfung von Zwangsheiraten – ein Beispiel für die Verflochtenheit von Selbstbestimmung, Gleichstellung und nachhaltiger Entwicklung. In: Bulletin, 2/2018 (in German). More