I am a Senior Researcher in Public International Law at Lund University, Faculty of Law, previously affiliated with the School of Business, Economics and Law at Gothenburg University and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation in November 2018 on the theme of solidarity in refugee protection. My thesis has been part of the Gothenburg/Lund/Uppsala Migration Law Network (GLUMIN) and was awarded the Oscar II:s stipend for its quality. The purpose of the thesis has been to critically analyze the nature, scope, and implications of the principle of solidarity in the context of asylum in Europe.

Through the study of solidarity, I’ve explored questions of community, political organization, and trust, developing a strong academic interest in the intersection between law and social sciences. My research interests include theory of international law, international and regional human rights systems, international refugee law, EU law, global mobility, and migration studies.

My work has been published in e.g., the Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law, the EE Research Handbook on Human Rights and Poverty, the Nordic Journal of International Law. I am the the co-editor of the books Law, Solidarity and the Limits of Social Europe: Constitutional Tensions for EU Integration (Edward Elgar 2022) and The New Asylum and Transit Countries in Europe During and in the Aftermath of the 2015/2016 Crisis (Brill 2018).

Ongoing Projects

Currently, I am pursuing the following projects: “Safe Third Country Rules Reconsidered”, part of the Borders Within project’s (funded by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, led by Associate Prof. Vladislava Stoyanova) which looks at the ways these rules have been employed by different actors in the field (states, IOs) and their broader implications for protection;  “Responsibility Allocation and UN GCR Implementation”, part of the ASILE project (funded by EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) which explores questions of attribution of responsibility in the context of EU’s cooperation with third countries including Türkiye, Tunisia, Serbia and Niger on migration management; “In Search of Solidarity: The Interplay between the Internal and External Dimension of EU Asylum Policy” (funded by R Söderberg foundation) concerned with the way in which the EU principle of solidarity has been invoked and informed externalization practices in the region (with focus on the EU-Turkey statement, EU-Libya migration management cooperation, Jordan Compact).

My teaching portfolio includes regular courses (at undergraduate and master levels) offered primarily by the Faculty of Law at Lund University including ‘International law’ with focus on treaty law, state responsibility and international organizations, ‘Human Rights law’ (history and origins of the human rights movement, approaches to human rights, European and African Human Rights systems, North-South relations and non-citizens rights), and ‘EU Migration law’ focusing on the European asylum system as well as on questions of large-scale refugee movements and third country practices. I have been supervising students who have successfully defended their bachelor and master theses (in Swedish and in English) on related topics. My experience from postgraduate courses includes a co-directorship of a PhD course on 'Attributing Responsibilty for Transnational Violations of Migrant Rights' in the context of the Graduate School in Migration and Integration, University of Gothenburg. I have also delivered lectures at the LU Gender Studies Department focusing on mobility, law, and gender. Furthermore, I have been teaching for four consecutive years at the Refugee Law Initiative MA on forced migration and human rights at SOAS University of London. Finally, I have been invited as guest lecturer in human rights courses at Universities in Sweden (Stockholm and Uppsala) and abroad, including the Queen Mary University of London, at the Migration Policy Centre, EUI Florence and the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece.

In my capacity as researcher and human rights lawyer I have been involved in activities with direct societal impact. At the international level, I have been invited by the UN Independent Expert on International Solidarity to provide written submissions to the proposed revised draft Declaration on the right of peoples and individuals to international solidarity. In addition, I have drafted expert reports concerning EU proposals for legal reforms (e.g., the 2020 EU Pact on Migration and Asylum) and to contribute to expert roundtables at EU institutions on the feasibility of EU laws on asylum, including the Dublin Regulation. Relying on my background as a migration law practitioner, I have sought to contribute to pending international courts’ cases concerning human rights (e.g., third-party intervention, ECtHR, Morshed Chowdhury and Others v. Greece, Application No. 21884/15).

In the Swedish context, I have conducted commissioned work for leading national research institutions, including the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies (SIEPS) and the Delegationen för migrationsstudier (Delmi). I have consulted the Swedish Migration Board through training seminars and expert opinions, and I have co-drafted several opinions concerning proposals to reform the Swedish Alien’s Act and the transposition of the EU Directives to domestic legal order (remiss). Finally, I have been keen on engaging with non-lawyers and disseminating my research findings to the broader public, through panel debates organized by the law faculty and the RWI, media interviews (TT, AB), MR Dagarna, Q&A sessions following movies at local cinemas and research visits at city libraries across Sweden.