Joel Thornton

Joel Thornton joined the Board of Directors for Christ In Action in 2025. With decades of international leadership experience, Joel is also the CEO and General Counsel for One Voice International, an organization that fights sex trafficking. He is an international human rights lawyer, engaged in international human rights law since 1997.

Joel served as Senior Counsel and Chief of Staff for Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law and Justice, Virginia from 1990 through 2004 and served as the Senior Counsel and Executive Director for the European Centre for Law and Justice based in Strasbourg, France and the Slavic Centre for Law and Justice based in Moscow, Russia from 1998 through 2004.

Joel’s legal experience has seen him work on 30+ cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, including being co-counsel on a number of cases before the Court. He has also worked on 6 cases at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. He has appeared in various federal and state courtrooms around the United States on behalf of clients involving first amendment freedom questions. Joel used his educational experience and served as Chief of Staff to John Barge, the Georgia State School Superintendent from 2011 through 2015. Joel began the Anti-Human Trafficking Imitative at the Georgia Department of Education where he organized and hosted a series of conferences designed to train education professionals on the issues surrounding human trafficking, both domestically and internationally.