Born in Germany, Eva Richter grew up as a refugee from Nazi Germany in Tianjin, China, where she lived through the turbulent years of the run-up to the Second World War, the Japanese occupation and the civil war that followed, until the Communist Revolution in 1949 decided the family to leave for the United States. She retired from teaching English at the City University of New York in 2002 to take up NGO advocacy work at the United Nations and co-founded the NGO Committee on Migration at the UN in 2007, serving on its Executive Committee and the Executive Committees of the NGO Committee on the Status of Women and the UN Department of Public Information. She is a member of the NGO Committee on Human Rights, was a member of the Expert Working Group for Addressing Women's Human Rights in the Global Compacts.