Karol Nowak

I am the Director of the Master´s Programme in International Human Rights Law. In my capacity as director I am responsible for planning and managing the program. In the Programme itself I am the course director for the courses Procedural law of human rights and Human rights in the field as well as supervising master theses during the final semester at the Programme.

I also teach constitutional- and procedural law at the Swedish law Programme and supervise master theses in those areas. At the Swedish law Programme I am the course director for the Nordic moot court competition course.

I frequently teach abroad as part of our cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg institute and at other universities in Sweden. I mainly have classes for practitioners such as judges and police officers in the fields of Human rights- and procedural law.

In my teaching I aim to describe the philosophical/historic underpinnings of today’s legislation and jurisprudence and how it can be legitimized as well as criticized.

In my research I am dealing with the protection of the individual from state abuse in, mainly but not exclusively, a procedural context. I have published comprehensively on the Presumption of innocence and have during the last few years dealt with issues that arise in fight against terrorism and serious crime in a European context. Issues dealt with are e.g. different types of profiling, interrogations, evidence gathering and how evidence can be used in court, all set against a human rights law background.

I aim to put todays threats in a historical context in order to see what trends are surfacing in today’s fight against crime and using philosophical tools in order to see if the methods can be justified when set against human rights standards.

I am also interested in the moral/ethical/philosophical claims that are made about human rights law as superior to other laws and how this claim can be reconciled with the demands of democracy.

I am a liaison officer with the Raoul Wallenberg institute (RWI) and frequently take on assignments by different private and government actors such as the police, judiciary, defense lawyers and prosecutors. In addition to this I give interviews in media, lecture at other universities in Sweden and abroad and do, to a smaller degree, extracurricular work for law firms and others.

II have worked with the European Commission in various projects and am frequently used by the RWI in their work with lectures for police, lawyers, prosecutors and others such as NGO-actors working with women’s rights as well as helped drafting a national action plan on human rights for a foreign government as requested by the Council of Europe e.g.

I am the coordinator for Sweden in the European Master’s Programme held in Venice, Italy, in Human Rights and Democratization (E.MA). It is a one-year advanced master’s course aimed at preparing professionals to respond to the operational requirements of daily work in international organizations, field operations, governmental and non-governmental bodies, and academia. It is run by The European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratization (EIUC) is an interdisciplinary centre of excellence formed by 41 universities from all European Union Member States.