Kelsey Romeo-Stuppy is the Policy Director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and has been a leader in global tobacco control since 2013. As an attorney and expert in tobacco control, Kelsey leads ASH’s policy portfolio and works to advance legal and policy approaches that protect health, human rights, and the environment while accelerating progress toward ending the tobacco epidemic.
In particular, Kelsey leads ASH’s human rights program, using the United Nations system and the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) to advance stronger protections for health and human rights. Her work engages the UN Human Rights Council and human rights treaty bodies, including the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). She is a subject matter expert on using human rights mechanisms to strengthen tobacco control and has helped elevate tobacco as an issue of children’s rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, and corporate accountability.
As co-chair of the Global Project Sunset Steering Committee, Kelsey directs ASH’s tobacco endgame policy mission and guides ASH’s work to phase out the sale of commercial tobacco products. Project Sunset brings together advocates, researchers, and policymakers working toward a future in which commercial tobacco is no longer sold. Kelsey also directs ASH’s work on tobacco industry liability and efforts to pursue civil and criminal accountability for tobacco industry harms. She led ASH’s successful involvement, with partner organizations, in litigation against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over its failure to act on menthol tobacco products.
Throughout her career, Kelsey has been active in the WHO FCTC Conference of the Parties (COP), with particular expertise in liability under Article 19, human rights, and the environmental impacts of tobacco products. In 2019, she launched ASH’s Tobacco and Human Rights Hub, a training resource that equips advocates around the world to incorporate human rights into tobacco control. She regularly trains advocates, policymakers, and public health professionals on legal and human rights strategies to advance tobacco control.
As an established expert on how to use legal and human rights arguments to further tobacco control, Kelsey trains other advocates, authors journal articles, and presents globally on tobacco control policy, human rights, liability, environmental health, and international law. Her writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and professional publications, including the American Bar Association’s International Law News on Tobacco and Human Rights in Latin America, which was selected for a “Best of the ABA” feature in GP Solo Magazine. She is also the author of a book chapter on tobacco industry corporate malfeasance and women’s rights violations. Her publications in the Tobacco Induced Diseases (TID) Journal are available here.
Kelsey presents regularly at numerous regional, national, and international conferences, including the World Conference on Tobacco and Health, ASH’s Global Forum on Human Rights and a Tobacco-Free World, hosted by the President of Romania at the Presidential Palace in Bucharest, and ASH’s 1st Global Tobacco Endgame Summit in Dublin, Ireland. She serves on the External Advisory Board for the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. She strives to continue learning and growing in the field; for example, she completed the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law’s Summer Program on Health Rights Litigation at Georgetown University Law Center.
Kelsey holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where she earned a certificate in International and Comparative Law and focused her studies on human rights and international law.