Archana Kotecha

Founder & CEO

Archana is a UK qualified barrister and CEDR accredited mediator who started her career practicing corporate law with KPMG then with DLA Piper. After 7 years as a corporate lawyer, Archana joined the UN Refugee Agency’s Legal Protection Team in London and subsequently the Immigration Advisory Service and Stop Trafficking UK in London. Archana’s expertise includes developing Operational Guidelines for Business on Remediation of Human Rights Grievances, in partnership with the IOM, developing a pilot programme for a non-judicial worker grievance mechanism for businesses in Malaysia, and conducting a scoping study on strengthening the strategic litigation ecosystem to tackle forced labour, human trafficking, and exploitation in supply chains in South East Asia.

Before founding The Remedy Project in 2021, Archana was the Head of Legal and Asian Region Director for Liberty Shared in Hong Kong. Disrupting the activities of traffickers by improving modern slavery’s visibility within financial institutions, educating NGOs and lawyers on anti-trafficking legal frameworks and victim identification have also been key aspects of Archana’s work. This included experience such as conducting an industry-focused analysis of Malaysia’s palm oil industry, with a specific focus on the industry’s governance and investment framework, relevant labour laws that apply to migrant workers in the industry, and various dispute resolution mechanisms, and conducting a study on pathways to compensation for victims of trafficking under anti-trafficking legal frameworks in Thailand and Cambodia.

Archana is also the Founder and Executive Director of ReAct Asia, the sister organisation of The Remedy Project. ReAct is a nonprofit advancing worker-led, community-based legal programmes.

Archana is an alumna of the London School of Economics and the prestigious US Department of State International Visitor Leadership Programme. She has been awarded the Emilie Ashurst Anti-Slavery Award for Leadership in 2021 and was named as one of the 2017 top ten innovative lawyers in Asia Pacific by the Financial Times Asia. Archana is a member of the Asian Seafood Improvement Collaborative Social Standards Steering Committee, the Steering Committee of the Responsible Labour Initiative of the Responsible Business Alliance, Expert Working Group on Complaints Mechanism member for the Forest Stewardship Council, and Alternative Legal Expert for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Open-Ended Intergovernmental working group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights (IGWG on TNCs and OBEs).