Jessica Almqvist is Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lund and Director of the Programme on International Human Rights Law at the same University.

Her main areas of expertise are international law of human rights, humanitarian law and criminal justice. She also researches other international law topics, such as statehood and recognition, international responsibility, the collective security system and global health law, including international biomedical law.

She has published extensively on these topics, including a monograph (Hart), articles in high-ranked journals, such as Leiden Journal of International Law, Journal of International Criminal Justice and International & Comparative Law Quarterly as well as edited volumes and book chapters published by Cambridge University Press and Routledge, among others. Her research has been funded by American and Swedish foundations, the EU, the Spanish government, etc.

Prior to her current position, Almqvist was Senior Lecturer of Public International Law and International Relations at the Law Faculty of the Autonomous University of Madrid where she has worked since 2010. Previously, she has held research positions at the NYU Center for International Cooperation in New York (Project on International Courts and Tribunals), the Foundation for International and External Dialogue in Madrid and the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies, also in Madrid.

She teaches graduate courses in the area of international law and human rights at Lund University.  She has also taught at New School for Social Research, NYU Law School, Instituto Global de Altos Estudios en Ciencias Sociales (Santo Domingo), Universidad de Navarra, La Sappienza, among others.

Since 2015, she is Senior Research Fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute, a think tank with offices in Madrid and Brussels that ranks 2nd in Europe in the category of foreign policy and international relations.

Almqvist has a law degree (LL.B. and LL.M) from Lund University in 1993. She obtained her PhD title in law in 2002 at the European University Institute in Florence with a dissertation on human rights, cultural diversity and the rule of law. She has a Diploma for Graduate Study of Political Science at UC Berkeley (1993/94) and has been visiting fellow at Columbia Law School (1998/99).