News
25.09.2020

Centre for Fundamental Rights and EUI launch a new research project on Leading Cases in UN Human Rights Law

This research project is part of the CIVICA university alliance. The Centre for Fundamental Rights welcomes Dr. Aristi Volou to the research group.

This research project, launched in September 2020 as part of CIVICA – The European University of Social Sciences, aims to shed light on the jurisprudence of the UN human rights treaty bodies and its contributions to international human rights law. In doing so, it will demonstrate and defend interdependence-oriented treaty interpretation on cross cutting themes.

Currently, there are eight distinct treaty bodies with competence to receive individual communications and adopt decisions (or ‘views’ in UN parlance). Over the last decade, the number of individual communications submitted to the treaty bodies has resulted in a dramatic expansion of their case law. Yet, the UN treaty bodies case law is little known to academics, practitioners and students. The project aims to fill a gap concerning the sustained and comparative treatment of the case law of the UN treaty bodies.

The project is a research collaboration between Prof. Başak Çalı and Dr. Alexandre Skander Galand of the Hertie School’s Centre for Fundamental Rights and Prof. Martin Scheinin of the European University Institute.

Dr. Aristi Volou is a research associate in this project. Volou has joined the Centre for Fundamental Rights in September 2020 after completing a PhD in International and Comparative Human Rights Law at the University of Leicester. Her PhD thesis concerned the interaction of legal orders in a European, international and comparative law context, in particular, by socio-economic rights. She completed an LLB in Law and an LLM in International Human Rights Law at the University of Leicester.

The project Leading Cases in UN Human Rights Law is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD.

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