Dr Veronika Fikfak awarded ERC Consolidator Grant

Out of 2,130 candidates, the European Research Council (ERC) has selected 308 researchers for this year’s Consolidator Grants. The funding will support excellent scientists and scholars at the career stage where they may still be consolidating their own independent research teams to pursue their most promising scientific ideas. Worth in total €627 million, the grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.

We are delighted that Dr Veronika Fikfak has been awarded funding her her project 'BREAKtheBIAS'.

BREAKtheBIAS project seeks to address one of the most challenging problems in the international human rights system: unequal access to human rights justice. It looks at the outcomes of thousands of international, regional, and domestic human rights cases and identifies who is able to turn to human rights bodies and which individuals and groups are unsuccessful in making their claims. By identifying barriers that restrict access and examining the role of international lawyers in the process, the project makes a significant advance in the study of inequities in international law. The aim is to understand the cause of access disparities – whether these be due to implicit, geographical, or structural legal bias, so that legal processes and existing structures can be redesigned to ensure equal access to human rights justice for everyone. 
 
The project will be hosted at UCL Political Science and School of Public Policy and at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law Ljubljana. 
 
Dr Fikfak says “I am excited to start this project, which will enable me to continue building interdisciplinary pan-European research teams, this time between London and Ljubljana. I look forward to bringing together researchers from across the world to study and work to improve access to international justice.” 
 
Veronika Fikfak is an Associate Professor at University College London, School of Public Policy and at the Centre of Excellence, iCourts at the University of Copenhagen. She currently leads an ERC Starting Grant project HRNUDGE, which looks at how states change their behaviour in response to judgments of human rights courts.