Michelle Bachelet, the executive director of UN Women, charged women to “make gender parity a lived reality, not just a mantra.” Peri Lynne Johnson has done just that in her own career at the United Nations, becoming the first woman legal advisor for both the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Johnson’s life-long belief that there are no limits to what professional women can accomplish was instilled in her from childhood by her father, an attorney active in the civil rights movement.

Johnson also believes that women must have the freedom to choose what is right for them, both personally and professionally, and she acknowledges the influence of motherhood on her own career choices. She resigned her position as an associate with Arnold & Porter in Washington, DC, in order to join her then husband in Guinea, where she worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Remaining in the United States upon the birth of her son, Johnson continued to build her UN career in New York, eventually rising to director of UNDP’s Legal Support Office. In January 2011, her son lodged happily in boarding school, Johnson chose to relocate to Vienna, Austria, to serve as director of IAEA’s Office of Legal Affairs. She earned her JD from Harvard Law School and her BA from Cornell University.

Clare Cosslett: Why did you decide to become a lawye r?

Peri Lynne Johnson: I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. My father graduated law school in 1957 and began his career in the early days of the civil rights movement working with the NAACP and with Dr. Martin Luther King. He was very involved in the St. Augustine march in the early 60s. Later in his career, he established his own general practice and became a local politician. In the seventies, my father became the first black president of the Jacksonville City Council and acting mayor of Jacksonville. So the law is in the family and that’s the origin of my interest in everything legal.

Cosslett: Do you have brothers and sisters?

Johnson: Yes. I have an older sister who is a psychiatrist in Atlanta and an older brother who is a practicing lawyer in Jacksonville. His practice is a lot like my father’s: a general practice in his own firm. I obviously have a very different practice than my father and my brother. I have another brother who is in television production in California and I had a younger brother who is deceased. We were originally five in the family.

Cosslett: How did you choose Cornell for undergraduate?

Johnson: My mother strongly encouraged us to go Ivy League. My sister went to Harvard College. I really liked Cornell and we had a close family friend who had gone there and had raved about it. It was definitely the right choice for me and I loved my college experience .

Cosslett: When you thought about law school, were you intending to be a civil rights lawyer like your dad?

Johnson: I knew I was interested in international work even from my days at Cornell. I also knew I was going to go to law school and I talked to my dad about my interest in international work . I studied French when I was in high school and fell in love with the French language and French culture. In addition to the importance of an Ivy League education, my mother’s other contribution to my résumé is that she loved everything international herself. We often had students visit us for about a month over the summer as part of the international exchange program. We had a Japanese student, a Swiss student, a French student, a Mexican student. I don’t think that’s a typical American experience. In college, I signed up for the exchange program that my mother had had us participate in for so many years and I lived with a French family in Nantes. I also studied abroad in France.

While I was at Cornell as a French literature major, I took a lot of coursework in international law, international relations, and government. I knew where I was headed. I wanted to balance my interest in foreign affairs with my interest in the law. I knew I wanted to blend both.

Cosslett: You made that decision very early on in your career .

Johnson: Very early. But even in law school I wasn’t exactly clear how it would all come into play. I was thinking that I would work in a private law firm and that I would be able to blend law and international work there, but it turned out not to be at all like that. I ended up joining the United Nations very early on in my career.

Cosslett: Did you continue with the international focus when you were at Harvard ? Were there lots of courses that were available to you?

Johnson: In your first year at an American law school, you have to take a number of core requirements: civil procedure, criminal law, property law, and the usual. You don’t have a lot of choices. It’s really in your second and third years that you have more options and that’s when I took international law, international human rights, and a clinic. At Harvard we had the option of taking clinics as well as standard coursework. One of the best things about being at Harvard was having so many options. You have access to the best professors and so many resources.

I had a very diverse law school profile. I did all of the standard requirements, including a lot of corporate work. I did a clinic in family law and although I knew I wasn’t going to have a family law practice, it was really exciting as a law student to have clients and to be working in the Boston courts. I worked with the Legal Aid clinic helping indigent families and women who were in abusive relationships trying to get divorced. It stands out as one of the important experiences of law school: the idea that with my legal training I could make a difference in people’s lives.

Cosslett: I’ve spoken with a number of attorneys who early in their careers had an opportunity to get into the courtroom through working with social services agencies, and that experience invariably is a powerful one.

You graduated Harvard Law School in the Class of 1991. Was Barack Obama in any of your classes?”

Johnson: Yes, we were classmates, although I was in a different section. He was really good friends, and still is, with one of my very good friends during law school. Through her, I got to know him. He was brilliant in law school—you know already that he was the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review. So even then he stood apart. More than his intelligence, I remember him as down to earth, and basically a really nice guy. So I’ve told people when they ask, that although he is “more polished now,” he is largely the same as he was in law school—what you see is really how he is—good values, thoughtful, smart. At the Harvard party during the inauguration celebrations, there were jokes about how many students and professors claimed to have him in their classes. So then Dean Clark, now Justice Clark, said, he must have taken more classes than anyone in the history of Harvard!

Cosslett: When you graduated, why did you choose Arnold & Porter ?

Johnson: After my second year, I split the summer between the DC offices of Arnold & Porter and Debevoise & Plimpton. I wanted to be in Washington. I really liked both firms and had a fabulous summer, but ultimately I chose Arnold & Porter because it was a large and very well-respected DC-based firm, and I thought I would get a wider variety of work than I would at the DC office of a New York–based firm.

Cosslett: And when you were at Arnold & Porter, you did both litigation and international work?

Johnson: I was really in the litigation practice, and the most interesting inter­national work was the pro bono work . Because Arnold & Porter was a large firm with really good values, they strongly supported pro bono work. To give you an example, one project involved research for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee that was being used to facilitate the CODESA¹ negotiations in South Africa. That was the process of transition to majority government. So, as a junior associate at the firm, I was being paid to do research on what kinds of precedents existed for this event. What is out there that might be relevant to this process of transitioning?

I remember that we were looking at the Native Americans here in the States and we were looking at the French colonial period. That was a fun and exciting project and they were really happy with our research. Another project involved reviewing and advising on the Togo Constitution . Togo is a country in West Africa. That was also very interesting, and so I had really good international projects that were pro bono. The firm’s for-profit international work was generally more commercial, and the international aspect was that you were dealing with parties in different countries.

Cosslett: What is the distinction between public international law and private/commercial international law?

Johnson: For the most part, private international law is commercial law involving entities within different countries. Public international law deals with states, international organizations, and treaties that impact states and international actors as opposed to just private companies and business. When I was in law school, I didn’t anticipate that an international practice in a major law firm, like Arnold & Porter, is essentially a corporate practice with international players. While there were exciting opportunities to travel, I was dealing essentially with commercial transactions.

Cosslett: What triggered your move to the United Nations?

Johnson: I got married during my third year of law school and my now ex-husband was joining the United Nations Development Program. He was assigned to Guinea, West Africa. We were newlyweds and I was in Washington with Arnold & Porter, and he was in Conakry with UNDP. We needed to figure out how we could be together, so I left the firm and joined the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a junior professional officer. I was recruited through the State Department.

The United Nations had a program whereby governments cover the costs of young professionals from their countries in order to afford them the experience of working in an international organization. That’s the idea of the Junior Professional Officers Program. I interviewed with State and was selected, and I moved to Conakry, Guinea. I was replacing another Harvard-trained American lawyer who had been the attorney at UNHCR and was finishing her two-year term. It just so happened that the timing was right. People are surprised to hear this because there are very few positions that the US government finances as junior professional officer posts, and that was one of very few globally that they financed.

The position involved working with political refugees from Liberia and Sierra Leone, so I assume the US had an interest in supporting those activities of the UN. The office in Conakry was quite small: there were only about four or five international staff, and the rest were national staff.

Cosslett: What did the work involve?

Johnson: It was human rights work, refugee law . It was very different from the work I had been doing at Arnold & Porter. I had some background from my international coursework at Harvard, but you don’t really understand the work of UNHCR until you’re on the ground doing it. I was an associate protection officer, which means that I was the lawyer for the refugees. My mandate was to protect them and their right to asylum, which included getting them to an asylum country. There wasn’t an issue in terms of access because Guinea had pretty much opened its borders to the refugees from Liberia and Sierra Leone. Conakry was sensitive because that’s where the political refugees were: the family of Samuel Doe, the assassinated president of Liberia, the military, senior officials in the government who couldn’t, for security reasons, be in the border areas where ninety-five percent of the refugees were.

Cosslett: Was Guinea the refugee country or were people in transit to another place?

Johnson: Guinea was where ninety-nine percent of the refugees stayed, and many of them are possibly still there because the conflict went on for so many years that some may have remained permanently. Don’t forget that the boundaries in Africa are, in some respects, artificial, so there are the same tribes and ethnic groups on both sides of these boundaries. That made it easier for Guinea to open the borders. There were some language issues—Guinea is French-speaking, whereas Liberia and Sierra Leone are English-speaking—and there were some cultural issues, but one advantage was that some of the same ethnic groups are in these border areas.

Cosslett: What did your days look like?

Johnson: In 1993 to ’94, the refugee population throughout the country totaled several hundred thousand. In Conakry, the capital, there were about twenty thousand or thirty thousand. It was a much smaller number of refugees. The day-to-day work was making sure these refugees were getting the benefits they needed to live: housing, food, and so on. To the extent possible, we also wanted to support them with education and training. I was involved in facilitating these things as much as possible, liaising with our NGO² partners, who were primarily responsible for the distribution of food and benefits. I remember the Evangelical Protestant Church of Guinea was one of our partners. The Red Cross was another partner. So the work in the field of a protection officer involves a lot of social services as well.

Cosslett: Was your background as a lawyer relevant to the work you were doing there?

Johnson: On a day-to-day basis, I would say it wasn’t. There was an incident, however, when a Cuban refugee defected and walked into our office saying, “I need protection.” I had to make the case as to why this person was a refugee, why he needed legal protection, and why, if he left our office, he would be vulnerable. I had to liaise with our offices in Geneva to get him out of the country. He lived in our office for seven months, and then finally, we were able to get him resettled in Venezuela. So that was the one case where I really had to use legal skills. The other skills necessary for the position were good management and administrative skills and just common sense.

Cosslett: You were there for almost two years. Was that the term of your posting?

Johnson: No, I came back early because I conceived my son there, and I had a high-risk pregnancy. The medical facilities in Conakry at the time were really not great for a high-risk pregnancy, so I ended up being evacuated and delivering in the US. After my son was born, I decided to stay in the States. When he was still an infant, I moved to New York, and started in the UN Office of Legal Affairs as an associate legal officer.

As you can see, as a woman, many of the career choices I made were around family issues. I moved to Guinea because my husband was there and we needed to be together. I wanted a job in the UN because he was there in the UN. And then once I had my son here, it did not make sense to take an infant to Conakry at the time. So there are personal family reasons that have really shaped my career.

It’s unrealistic to think that women, in any profession, can make career choices without regard to family matters, unless you choose just not to marry or have kids, and many women do that. I’m not dogmatic. I think every woman has to have the choice and, for me, as long as that woman is choosing what’s right for her and her personal circumstance, that’s what’s important.

Cosslett: You went in to the UN via the State Department to fill a role in the UNHCR. Once you finished that role, were you able to go into any arm of the United Nations? Are you now part of the club?

Johnson: There’s no guarantee. The contract with UNHCR ended. Conakry had been exciting and important and was a way into the UN organization but being back in the UN Office for Legal Affairs was really coming home. I started out as a consultant for about six months. I then took the National Competitive Exam , which was the career entry exam for the UN. It was offered to different countries in different subject areas, so I took it as an American in legal.

Cosslett: If someone now wants to go work for the UN as an attorney, do they still offer those examinations?

Johnson: Yes, there is still an exam for young professionals who are interested in a career track at the UN, like the Foreign Service Exam for the US government. I think you have to take it before the age of thirty-two. It’s offered by country and subject, so if your country is overrepresented in a certain subject area, you wouldn’t be eligible to take it. That is the way the UN recruits staff for junior career track positions.

Cosslett: Can you outline the organization of the UN Legal Department ?

Johnson: The Office of Legal Affairs has several different divisions. There’s the Office of Legal Counsel, which focuses on pure public international law, the rules and procedures of the governing bodies of the UN. There’s also the General Legal Division, which is the in-house counseling division. Much of the work in the General Legal Division is exactly what you would think an in-house counsel does in a US corporation: you’re dealing with personnel issues. You’re dealing with contractual issues.

We also dealt with institutional issues, which are more in the public international law area—issues of mandates and authorities of the governing bodies. Institutional work would include, for example, an analysis of the mandate of UNDP in terms of either a certain development assistance program or a developmental modality, meaning the way in which they would work with a government to provide assistance. The institutional work is about understanding what the basis of an organization’s mandate is, and whether a proposed action is within that mandate, or whether they have to go back to the General Assembly or to the Executive Board for an additional mandate. It’s really the internal institutional work of the UN.

Cosslett: It’s like looking at a corporation and asking, “Is this activity within the scope of its charter?”

Johnson: Exactly. And in the UN context, you’re looking at General Assembly resolutions and Executive Board resolutions and tracing things through history. In fact, I have published an article about this very topic—UNDP’s national execution modality. The article looks at the issue in a historical context. In the seventies, the member states said that UNDP should be working with its national partners in providing development assistance rather than just having international experts come in. Using a historical analysis, we considered the evolution of modalities for providing development assistance and whether the then current approaches were consistent with the mandate as articulated in General Assembly resolutions and Executive Board decisions.

Cosslett: This work sounds so interesting and unique to the UN .

Johnson: I think you would see it in another international organization, but I have to say—and I’m biased, obviously—that it’s really exciting to be with the UN. The work has been really interesting. I have shared notes with friends and colleagues who have taken different tracks and they weren’t all excited about their work. You must have heard lawyers say things like their work was boring, that they were just doing it for the money. That has not been my experience at all since I joined the UN. I have really liked the work here and am lucky that, for family reasons, my career took a different direction early on.

Cosslett: Do UN salaries stack up against salaries at Wall Street firms?

Johnson: Absolutely not. The salaries are good and we have nice benefits. We have the tax benefit and a nice package, but there’s no comparison to partners in New York who are making a million-dollars plus. The secretary-general makes around $350,000 to $400,000, just to give you an idea. These are not million-dollar salaries. They are government salaries. In fact, there’s a formula: they benchmark against several government salaries . So that’s really the comparison, not private sector.

Cosslett: How does the UN reward seniority ?

Johnson: Of course, you have much more authority. You make the decisions. As a junior lawyer, I was researching important questions, I was drafting important documents, I was involved in important issues, and I was in important meetings—but I couldn’t make the decision. Of course, since I was doing the research and the drafting, I could contribute, but at the end of the day, decisions are made that take into account many factors that I wasn’t always privy to.

As a junior lawyer, I had the best mentors—great UN lawyers who had started in the seventies and who were the second generation of UN lawyers. They were the decision makers. The difference now is that I have lawyers whom I can guide in terms of the research and the original drafting—although I always tell my staff, “I’m a working director.” So even now I often do my own research and drafting, especially if it’s a very sensitive project. I’ve always been a hard worker and I think that’s why I got more projects and interesting projects. And I’ve always been excited to be part of the organization and excited to do my best work. Even today, legal is one input to a decision and is not the only consideration. I can’t say today that everything the Legal Office recommends is adopted as the final approach in a given case, but, as director, what comes out of the Legal Office is absolutely a recommendation that I agree with.

Cosslett: Where does the Office of Legal Affairs fit within the UN structure?

Johnson: The Office of Legal Affairs is an independent office within the United Nations, as is the IAEA. I’m the legal advisor to the Office of Legal Affairs here at the IAEA. We’re independent of the United Nations secretary-general, and I report directly to the director-general. Each UN organization—and there are many—has its own legal advisor. Sometimes they are called legal counsel or general counsel. And most of the structures have the legal counsel reporting directly to the executive head, which is what it should be, in my view. People assume you have the legal counsel reporting to the management, and I don’t think that’s the right approach. You advise management but you report to the head of management? I think it’s got to be an independent function.

Cosslett: Tell me about your move to UNDP .

Johnson: As part of my position with the Office of Legal Affairs, I was involved with a lot of UNDP- and UNICEF-type work, which is the work of the funds and programs. I had been advising and writing on UNDP’s development framework, so I knew quite a lot about UNDP. They asked me to come and expand their legal office. While I am sometimes credited today with having created the legal office, there was a small office when I arrived in 2000. Two or three lawyers. I was responsible for corporate law and built up that team. I was promoted to senior legal advisor, and in 2007, I was asked to be officer in charge. I was confirmed shortly thereafter as director, so I was then responsible for the entire office, which included an administrative law section dealing with personnel issues, amongst other things, as well as a corporate section.

Cosslett: What’s the mission of UNDP?

Johnson: UNDP is the largest organ of the UN. It’s a multi-billion dollar organization. It has offices in one hundred sixty-six countries and it has eight thousand staff. UNDP is very, very large, and it is the face of the UN in the field. The head of the UNDP office is always the head of the UN on a country level, unless there’s a peacekeeping mission and there’s a representative from the secretary-general’s office there.

UNDP’s mission is to eradicate poverty. It’s a really huge mission: working in partnership with people and institutions to eradicate poverty. One of the things that UNDP has always struggled with is the brand. You hear, “UNICEF,” and you know what it’s about, right? Children. UNDP has a broad mandate, but it’s not one you put a face to—like women and children. It’s about poverty. It’s about crisis intervention. It’s about governance. It’s about working with institutions to have institutional policies that support growth in a transparent and democratic way.

Cosslett: How big was the legal department by the time you left?

Johnson: I think we were close to thirteen lawyers when I left to join the IAEA and we had a few additional lawyers out-posted to regions, which gave greater support for those regions. So it was a proper legal office with full teams on both the administrative and corporate sides. I was very happy to leave a full team. In the UN, everybody is from somewhere else and I don’t remember the number of nationalities, but typically there were a few American lawyers. There is a practice in the UN overall that the number of posts that a country is allocated is based on the amount of money it can contribute.

Cosslett: Tell me about your experiences practicing with attorneys trained in other countries. Do you find that their methodology and their intentions are generally the same as US-trained attorneys, or are they completely different?

Johnson: I’ve been impressed that the UN has attracted, in general, really smart lawyers—lawyers who were top in their countries and in their systems. I’ve worked with great Russian lawyers. My mentor was a Chinese lawyer in the General Legal Division. I’ve worked with great African lawyers. But, of course, if you’re coming from common law training, you find that common law lawyers have a different approach than do civil law lawyers. Common law lawyers are looking for precedents. It’s just the way we’re trained, and civil law lawyers are looking for what the statutes say. So, yes, you do notice these different traditions.

Cosslett: I do think lawyers are trained differently in different countries. US lawyers often pride themselves on their role as dealmakers rather than drafts people.

Johnson: I agree with you that there are some differences, and then, at the same time, when you come into the UN, there’s a UN practice. There’s a UN approach. So lawyers coming in try to blend in. If you get a file, you are thinking, “Okay, what’s been done before on this?” Nothing is ever for the first time in the UN. As a junior lawyer, I loved to get the file. I loved reading the file to figure out, “Okay, how was this question answered before? What was considered before?” It was a lot of that work. So no matter your tradition, no matter where you’re coming from, no matter what your training, what you’re going to be doing as a junior lawyer is to get the file, to see what the precedents are, to understand how it was handled before, and then you’re formulating advice that’s pretty much in line with past practice unless there’s some reason to depart now.

In most cases, the question has been asked before. It’s hard when it’s the first time, and there’s a lot to learn. It doesn’t mean you always do what was done before, but our decisions are informed by history.

Cosslett: It must be nice, as a lawyer, to have that body of past practice to advise you.

Johnson: Oh, absolutely. My most important resources are my files from the past twenty years that are with me now in Vienna. I have kept them always because I’ve worked on so many matters, and they are an invaluable resource. I have so much knowledge about the history of why things have been decided a certain way at the UN. It’s really important.

Cosslett: You joined the IAEA in January of 2011. How did you make that transition and was it a big decision for you to move to Austria?

Johnson: I was invited to apply to this position. It had been advertised twice, and I hadn’t noticed it, but they sent me an e-mail and I thought about it, decided to apply, and then was successful in getting the position. It was a big change from the development side of the UN, but I was ready to make the change. I had been in UNDP for ten years and had done everything I could possibly do there, so there wasn’t really any more growth for me in that position.

I think when you get to a point where you can do your job in your sleep, it’s time to move on. The timing was perfect because my son was in boarding school and, although I wasn’t actively looking, inside I was feeling: “If I’m going to make a change, this is the time.” So, yes, it was a big move, but I was really ready for something new and I really wanted a challenge. I wanted to keep growing and learning. I wanted to continue to be stimulated. I didn’t want to become “dead wood,” where I just lost my motivation because, so what, I’ve done it for ten years.

Cosslett: What is the relationship between the IAEA and the UN ?

Johnson: The IAEA is established as an independent organization, but in autonomous association with the UN. The director-general of the IAEA does not report to the secretary-general. My boss at UNDP, on the other hand, does report to the secretary-general because UNDP is a fund of the UN. The IAEA is a completely separate international organization.

Cosslett: What is their mandate?

Johnson: The IAEA was established as a result of the vision of President Eisenhower in the early fifties. The mandate of the organization is (1) to facilitate the use of nuclear material for peaceful purposes and (2) to make sure that nuclear material is safeguarded. Implementation of safeguards is the work that has made the agency famous. It’s the work you read about in the news. Safeguarding includes the verification activities of inspectors to ensure that we know where the nuclear material is located in a country and to confirm that it’s not being used for military purposes. For this reason, the IAEA is known as the nuclear watchdog.

But the IAEA has a huge development function as well: there are many uses of nuclear energy that benefit developing countries. The focus this year is food and how we’re using nuclear technologies for food production. Last year the focus was water, how we can use nuclear technologies in connection with water—even how to find water in dry areas. The year before that it was nuclear technologies and cancer therapies.

So there is a whole development side of our work, which doesn’t get the kind of attention that the safeguards and nonproliferation work does, but the current director-general has wanted to highlight that we’re not just the nuclear watchdog. I think my being selected, coming from the UNDP, has a lot to do with that: I’m a lawyer from the development arm of the UN, and now I’m the lawyer for the IAEA.

Cosslett: Was the IAEA established as the enforcement agency for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty ?

Johnson: Based on the NPT, parties to the NPT agree that they will have their nuclear material under IAEA safeguards. That is how we come in. The NPT specifically provides that parties should have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. We have over one hundred and seventy such comprehensive safeguards agreements and this is the agreement by which we verify the use of nuclear material in a country. They have to report what they have, they have to report what they’re using it for, and we have a number of provisions that allow us to determine that the material is being used for the purposes declared and we can then verify that. We have a number of procedures and tools under the agreement that we can use to give assurance to the international community that the nuclear material in the relevant country is being used as intended. That is essentially the concept of the safeguards agreement.

Cosslett: Let’s talk about Fukushima . Did the IAEA have a role in disaster relief?

Johnson: We have an action plan on implementation and follow-up for Fuku­shima, but the short of it is: immediately after the incident, we were notified and our emergency machinery kicked in. Under an agreed framework with member states, we notified our members that there had been an accident. So our immediate role is getting the information out there to the international community.

The other role, of course, is where states request assistance, we facilitate that assistance. The main conventions are the Early Notification Convention and the Assistance Convention. Assistance can also be offered and provided bilaterally outside of the convention. In the case of Fukushima, such arrangements were made including with the United States government. And the agency offered to provide whatever Japan needed. Since the accident, there have been a number of expert missions looking at different technical issues. There are lots of different aspects to this accident and the agency’s role is far-reaching.

Cosslett: So the role of the agency is that of prime responder in terms of coordinating an international response to a nuclear disaster ?

Johnson: That is the specific role for the agency that you will see in the Assistance Convention, when requested. We also have the responsibility of notifying member states as described under the Early Notification Convention. And then outside of these two conventions, our General Conference has adopted resolutions that have expanded the role of the agency in these areas. For example, relating to support for an accident in a nonmember state. We have a primary role in safety, security, and safeguards. So in a nuclear accident, that kicks in in terms of immediate support upon request of a state concerned and, at the same time, we keep the member states and the international community informed because there is the obvious risk that when there is a nuclear accident, there could be impact beyond borders. The system is very much also focused on information sharing.

The IAEA has a secretariat, but we’re an organization of member states just like the UN is an organization of member states. We have one hundred fifty-four member states. We can’t provide assistance if states don’t want assistance. But of course, we offer. And so we have been able to work directly, in this case with Japan, and there are other states that have had accidents over the years—much smaller ones of course. But it’s not just the agency. Don’t forget there’s a lot of bilateral assistance. What we saw play out in Japan is that they had a number of bilateral relationships—with the US, for example. The US and Japan have worked closely together, and very soon after the accident, the US was sending in all kinds of equipment, support, etc. The IAEA is not the only actor. We have a prime role as reflected in the treaties and the General Conference resolutions when it relates to nuclear, but we are not the only actor.

Cosslett: The IAEA has issued a formal rebuke with regard to Iran and their nuclear program . What does that mean? What’s the sanctioning authority of the IAEA?

Johnson: I’m not talking about Iran, but in general terms. Under Article 12C of our statute, there’s a provision saying that if there’s a finding of noncompliance with the state’s safeguards obligations, this information is reported to the board of governors, which is our executive board comprised of thirty-five states. If the board actually finds noncompliance, then, under the statute, there are a number of measures the board can take, including referral to the Security Council. So that is the gist of it.

There are a few other possible actions as well, such as curtailing assistance on technical assistance projects. What you read about with regard to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Iran have included referrals to the Security Council. Once things are referred to the Security Council, depending on the action taken, it could lead to Security Council sanctions. So the secretariat’s role under the Safeguards Agreement is to report to member states about compliance with safeguards obligations. If the secretariat finds that there is noncompliance or that there is concern about whether nuclear material is being used for the purposes declared, this is information that we have to raise with the member states, and then they decide under Article 12C of the statute, what action is required. So there are different tools.

Cosslett: Germany has said that they no longer want to have nuclear power within the country for any purposes after Fukushima. Do you see more countries wanting to move towards a non-nuclear future ?

Johnson: What I can say is the agency was itself created to promote the use of nuclear energy. After the atomic bomb, President Eisenhower wanted to use this power in a productive way, for the benefit of humanity. It is powerful. It can be dangerous, and at the same time, you can provide energy that’s used to provide electricity. It’s allowing us to develop technologies in terms of medical treatments and cancer therapies. Our statute is about the promotion of the peaceful use of nuclear energy. That’s what we’re here to do.

I think the sight of those nuclear reactors at Fukushima that couldn’t be immediately controlled was very scary for our citizens. But from what I understand, and this is not my area as legal advisor , while some states are scaling back or phasing out nuclear power generation, like Germany, many others are moving ahead, like China and other countries in Asia. Perhaps the increase in the number of nuclear reactors won’t be as high as it was before Fukushima, but it is still growing.

Cosslett: I live within ten miles of a nuclear reactor, and I have difficulty in reconciling the claims that it is “safe, secure, and vital” with the constant testing of the emergency evacuation siren.

Johnson: If I were not supportive of nuclear energy, I couldn’t be the legal advisor of the IAEA. I’m not opposed to nuclear energy, but I am for safe use of nuclear energy. And because it is a potentially hazardous source, then we have to impose the highest standards. I think there’s zero tolerance for safety lapses or security lapses, and this is the work of the agency. Safety, security, safeguards. I feel good to be a part of the agency that’s charged with that mandate. Since nuclear energy is here and it doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon, and I don’t think that it will, at least not in terms of peaceful purposes of nuclear energy, let’s work together to make sure it’s the safest, it’s the most secure, and it’s safeguarded.

Cosslett: Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Johnson: I’m forty-five years old, and legal advisor of the IAEA. For many, this is the height of a career. For now, I’m happy in this position. I still have my links with my position in New York City, as I have a permanent contract in UNDP. And then who knows down the road.

But obviously, at this point my career is very much UN, so I do see myself staying within the UN world. I don’t see myself going out and going into the private sector at this point. I have a mandatory retirement age of sixty-two. For those who entered before 1994, it’s sixty and they are currently thinking about extending it to sixty-five.

Cosslett: I’m just thinking that’s a great age to go into a law firm in a counsel position, where you can, at an exorbitant salary, advise people on all of these issues upon which you are now an expert.

Johnson: I’ll have to keep that in mind.

Cosslett: Within the UN, who do you actually represent?

Johnson: In the UN, we have many stakeholders. If you look at the mission statement of the Office of Legal Affairs, I am the director-general’s lawyer. That’s first. Second, I also provide technical support to member states because this is their organization. So member states ask questions, we give technical inputs, and provide legislative assistance on their nuclear laws. It’s a big part of the work that we do in the Legal Office.

Cosslett: Is there a code of conduct specific to lawyers within the UN?

Johnson: The UN has rules and regulations and a code of conduct applicable to all staff, including lawyers. In recent years, there has been a focus on ethics and ethical standards for all UN staff. There’s mandatory training. There have been some high-profile harassment cases that you may have read about. So from the UN perspective, these issues of professional responsibility have been about that. It’s also been about ensuring that we follow the code of conduct. We are an organization of many states, so you see this play out in terms of procurement. We want to make sure it’s a transparent process, that no one state has a favored access to another state. We can’t take gifts from states, and as for other gifts, these can’t have more than nominal value. We have to ensure there’s no pressure or favoritism or anything like that. Also, staff at a certain level have to disclose if they have any investments or any other outside activities that would infringe on their independence.

Cosslett: What advice can you give to law students or practicing attorneys about jobs at the UN or other international agencies that might provide attractive career opportunities?

Johnson: I think the UN is the best and the broadest. And the UN is huge. It is not one organization. If you go to the UN.org web site, I think there are more than thirty different UN organizations. But other than UN, you could look at the banks. Don’t forget the World Bank and the regional development banks. There’s the African Development Bank, there’s the European Regional Development Bank. These are international institutions as well. They’re focused on financial issues, but they’re international organizations. There’s the OSCE³. There’s the OECD⁴. There are many international organizations.

Cosslett: If it’s an acronym, apply! What advice would you give law students about positioning themselves as attractive candidates for an international career?

Johnson: Everybody wants to talk about careers in international law, and I’ve spoken and written on this. I have been hiring lawyers for many years now in the UN. I look for someone who has international experience , someone who speaks a foreign language, someone who I can see really has some kind of interest and awareness of things international. You get so many applicants for these positions that this is a threshold determination.

An American candidate, for example, who doesn’t have a foreign language and has never lived abroad is not an interesting candidate for the UN. You want folks who are acclimatized to working in an international environment. They’ve lived abroad or they have had some international experience—even volunteering, like Peace Corps or working for an NGO, even sometimes teaching international law. One of my lawyers in the IAEA is a professor of public international law, so he’s a respected public international lawyer, but from an academic background. And, at a junior level, I’m really looking for someone who demonstrates that they can speak a foreign language.

The UN has six official languages, and in many duty stations you work in more than English. At the IAEA we work in English, but we still have six official languages. As you know, I studied French, I studied Spanish. I am now learning German, being here in Austria. And it’s important because you’re working in a multicultural environment, so a candidate that is from a different country or that speaks a different language or has lived abroad is interesting.

Cosslett: If you have someone who’s been a litigator or a corporate lawyer but who happens to have a strong international background and languages, then that would be an attractive candidate?

Johnson: I came from Arnold & Porter and that’s an American law firm, but I could tell the UN that much of what I did was international. We want the best lawyers, and I think the training that you get in law firms is top training. So a law firm background could be interesting if you can demonstrate some kind of an international link as well. Now, at the same time, don’t forget we have special needs for lawyers in certain areas of expertise, so at the UN in New York, we hired a number of lawyers out of firms who had experience in international arbitration. Don’t forget that the UN spends millions in procurement, so we do have claims and we do have arbitration.

Cosslett: Have you encountered issues specific to being a female attorney?

Johnson: You see greater gender parity at the UN. In my office at the IAEA, for example, we’re almost fifty-fifty female/male. I think legal is a field where you see more equity. Harvard was definitely about fifty-fifty. Within the UN, UNDP is one of the leaders in terms of gender equity: Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand is the administrator and the deputy, Rebecca Grynspan, former vice president of Costa Rica, is also a woman. Half of the assistant secretary-generals are women. As an organization focusing on development, women at UNDP are well represented.

The IAEA, on the other hand, is traditionally male given it is a technical organization. I work with physicists and engineers and, for whatever reason, there are many fewer women going into that field. But, as I said, the Legal Office is just about 50/50. I have never personally experienced any discrimination because of gender. I was the first woman legal advisor in the UNDP and I am the first woman legal advisor in the IAEA. I asked my staff whether it meant anything that I’m woman versus a man, and I couldn’t really get a concrete answer.

At a recent event held by the IAEA, there was a focus on how to recruit women in the agency. There was a lot said about a women’s style: that we’re more collaborative. That if there were more women leaders there’d be less war. I think no one really knows for sure exactly how it would really play out, but one of my favorite quotes about women came from Michelle Bachelet, the executive director of UN Women. She said let’s “make gender parity a lived reality, not just a mantra.”

Women can be who we want to be. We can be physicists, engineers, lawyers. I am a lawyer because of my dad’s influence. I grew up knowing I could be whatever I wanted to be. I never grew up thinking there were limits.

¹ Convention for a Democratic South Africa

² non-governmental organization

³ Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

⁴ Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development