Bonny Ling
Executive Director, Work Better Innovations; Research Fellow, IHRB
Bonny is Executive Director of Work Better Innovations, a research consultancy with a community service mission working on new ideas for a responsible economy. She wrote her PhD in Law on human trafficking and China, at the Irish Centre of Human Rights of the National University of Ireland, Galway, and is an expert on human trafficking and contemporary slavery.
Bonny has a rich and diverse professional background in international diplomacy. She has worked with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Peacekeeping Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, UN Mission in Liberia and UNESCO. In 2004, she was part of the UN legal team that worked on the Cyprus peace talks. Bonny was an election observer for the referendum on East Timor’s independence and also for the OSCE in the Republic of Georgia and Albania.
Bonny is a practitioner-scholar. She taught human rights at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She later served as the Programme Director of the international summer school on business and human rights at the University of Zurich. Bonny also taught at Sciences Po Paris and was a visiting scholar at the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge University, where she interviewed Chinese irregular migrants and worked on a research project that set out policy recommendations for inclusive, community policing in England.
Bonny is a graduate of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and University of Georgia in the US. She is a President Truman Scholar, Gates Cambridge Fellow and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, which recognises the contributions made by immigrants to American life.
Since 2019, Bonny is based in the UK and consults for ECOFACT on ESG regulatory developments in Asia. She regularly writes on human rights, migrants and business responsibilities with a focus on the Asia-Pacific; and is a strong advocate for the responsible recruitment of migrant workers. Her book chapter on the Abolition of Slavery in China has been published in a volume on studies in global slavery on Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250–1900.