Eva Richter

Born in Germany, Eva Richter grew up as a refugee from Nazi Germany in Tianjin, China, and lived there through the run-up to the Second World War, the Japanese occupation, and the civil war that followed, until the Communist Revolution finally drove her family out. In 1948, with documentation provided for stateless people by the UN International Refugee Organization, she migrated to the United States.

Graduating from the University of Chicago, she started a 47-year career teaching English in various colleges and universities both in the US and abroad. Among other honors, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Netherlands and an “Outstanding Foreign Expert” designation from the Education Commission of Hebei Province, China.

Since her retirement from the City University of New York (2002), she has been working at the United Nations as an NGO representative, advocating for the human rights and protection of refugees and migrants. In 2006 she co-founded the NGO Committee on Migration, a committee in consultative relationship with UN ECOSOC. She is a member of the organization Business and Professional Women, and as a member of the Poverty Elimination and Community Education (PEACE) Foundation, she was instrumental in establishing a free school and training program in Shibpur, Bangladesh, emphasizing the education of women and girls. She has served on the Executive Committees of various UN Committees, has developed numerous workshops, a school curriculum on migrants and refugees, and other programs, and has actively helped develop the contributions of civil society to the formation and adoption of the Global Compact on Migration (GCM 2018), especially as a member of the UN Women Expert Working Group on Addressing Women’s Human Rights in the GCM. She has participated in several meetings of the annual Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), the International Migration Review Forum (IMRF), and the annual NGO conference on the Status of Women.

She was married for fifty-three years (now widowed), has two sons, and three amazing grandchildren.

A memoir of her China childhood, Seeking Home, was published in 2025 by Bloomsbury Press. It has been translated into Chinese, with a German translation in the works.