Lemke, Stefanie

I am a socio-legal scholar and senior legal adviser, working on several projects with the University of Oxford, the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the United Nations Development Programme. My fields of expertise are human rights and the rule of law, particularly access to justice, judicial independence, legal profession reform, legal empowerment and capacity building, with an emphasis on Europe, Central Asia and Latin America. For more than a decade, I have led numerous comparative, interdisciplinary and large-scale research projects, litigated high-profile cases before the International Criminal Court and UN human rights bodies, trained diplomats and legal practitioners, and provided my high-level expertise to various key stakeholders. After studying law in Germany, Argentina, Spain and France, I pursued a Ph.D. thesis on "Human Rights Lawyering and Access to Justice in Europe" (passed with distinction, "magna cum laude") at the Universities of Cologne, London and Oxford. I am also a regular (guest) lecturer at Dutch, German and UK universities, act as a reviewer with inter alia the Europea Commission's Justice Programme, and present my research findings at important conferences. My work was widely published for varied audiences, most recently with Cambridge University Press.

Area(s) of expertise: access to justice; judicial independence; legal profession; legal empowerment; Europe