Gabriela Castellanos is a Honduran lawyer. Castellanos has served since December 2013 as the executive director of the National Anticorruption Council (CNA), a civil society organization in Honduras dedicated to studying, training, dissuading, denouncing, and combating corruption. Castellanos is additionally a columnist for the newspaper El Heraldo, where she raises awareness in Honduras of important topics such as corruption, social inequalities, regional issues, and the rule of law.
A lawyer by training, she graduated from the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), and studied criminal law, human rights, violence, and social coexistence at UNAH. She additionally studied non-profit law and other topics not directly related to transparency, accountability, governance, and institutionalism. Her education further included a specialization course in law: organized crime, corruption, and terrorism, taught by the University of Salamanca, Spain. In December 2021, she was internationally recognized as an “Anti-Corruption Champion” by the United States Department of State.
During her tenure, the CNA achieved certification by Counterpart International in organizational development processes, making it the first civil society institution in Latin America to do so. Additionally, the organization obtained certification under the ISO-9001:2015 standard, recognizing the quality and transparency of their implemented system in the provision of services.
From 2014 to the present, 150 complaints have been filed with the justice system, of which 27 cases have been prosecuted by the Public Ministry under her leadership. Under her direction, the Anticorruption Criminal Policy Observatory (OPCA) was established in February 2020. OPCA is a research center aimed at promoting knowledge management across all sectors of the population. It focuses on the publication of scientific research with legal, economic, political, and social perspectives, addressing issues of social justice and the prevention of societal harm from corruption.
Gabriela Castellanos was an event speaker at the Dialogue.