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- Director, Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe
- Claudia Luciani joined the Directorate of Political Affairs in the early 1990s where she worked as political adviser on South-East Europe, minorities, the Russian Federation and South Caucasus. She held a number of positions in the Directorate of Political Affairs, served in the field, took part in high level negotiations, was engaged in the accession and monitoring processes of the new member States and was appointed Director of Political Advice and Co-operation by the Secretary General in 2007. Her responsibilities included providing political advice to the Secretary General and the Committee of Ministers and overseeing the co-operation programmes through the field offices. She always kept close relations with major civil society organisations active on the ground and was responsible for their interaction with the Council of Europe. Another of her responsibilities was to oversee the setting up and running of the Schools of Political Studies and help expand their network. She later served as the Director of Programmes tasked by the Secretary General of implementing the reformed co-operation structures both at headquarters and in the field which included the elaboration and adoption of country specific Action Plans and neighbouring policies co-operation frameworks. She was later appointed Director of Democratic Governance and Diversity overseeing 6 partial agreements - including the North South Centre – and was responsible for the areas of culture, cultural heritage and inter-cultural cities, whilst also overseeing the Council of Europe’s intergovernmental work on governance issues, elections assistance and civil society as well as the Conference of International NGOs. She later served as the Director of Anti-discrimination and Governance focusing on national minorities and minority languages monitoring mechanisms and Roma and travellers. In 2018 she became Director of Human Dignity, Equality and Governance overseeing the implementation of the Istanbul and Trafficking Conventions as well as the Gender Equality Commission. Her work on democratic governance continued through the Centre of Expertise on good governance and the organisation- annually- of the World Forum for Democracy. For the last four years, she co-managed with DG1 the intergovernmental activities on Artificial Intelligence (CAI). Since January 2024 Claudia has been appointed Director of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities. Her responsibilities include also overseeing cooperation in the field in a number of member states, notably in Ukraine, through the Centre of Expertise for Multilevel Governance and coordinating the Congress’ contribution to the New Democracy Pact of the Secretary General.
Claudia studied philosophy at Trinity College (Washington, DC), graduated in Political Science (University of Padua) holds a specialisation in International Public Law and studied at ENA (Paris). She has lectured about the Council of Europe in a number of academic fora, including the Human Rights Center Antonio Papisca, Catholic University and Syracuse University.
