About.

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Dr. Stefanie Lemke is a socio-legal scholar and a senior legal adviser, focussing on a broad range of matters concerning the protection of human rights and the rule of law. Her expertise lies in exploring how people have access to justice, and investigating the interplay between politics, judges and civil society.

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After studying law in France, Germany and Spain, she completed a PhD on legal empowerment at Oxford, London and Cologne Universities, and was trained as a civil judge, a public prosecutor and a human rights lawyer in Germany, litigating high-profile cases before UN human rights treaty bodies and the International Criminal Court. She has worked - globally and across sectors - with governments, leading research groups, prominent NGOs, commercial law firms and international aid agencies such as the German Ministry for International Development, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the US law firm Shearman & Sterling LLP and the United Nations in the Balkans, Caucasus, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Western Europe and Southeast Asia.  

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Stefanie started working in academia in 2006, with a research group on legal profession reform at Cologne University, where she was a senior researcher until 2015. She led large-scale projects and taught at inter alia Bonn University, Utrecht University's Netherlands Institute for Human Rights (SIM), Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, and the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, the global hub for everyone working on law and society. She is the director of the RULE OF LAW INITIATIVE, an international human rights platform promoting people-centred justice, which she set up in 2016. She is a team member of an EU-funded project on cultural rights at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Leeds University's Legal Profession Research Group, and Lodz University's Eastern Block Censorship Research Group, where she serves on the board. 

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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​A recognized expert in her field, Stefanie regularly acts as an adviser to the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the EU. Currently, she is the team leader for a UNDP project on access to justice of forcibly displaced populations, acts as the European Commission's National Expert for Germany, advises the Council of Europe's Office in Ukraine on integrity and powers of prosecutors, and is appointed to several EU expert committees promoting civic space, gender equality and digitalisation. In 2021, she was commissioned to draft Europe's first guidelines on legal aid, which were adopted by the Council of Europe's 46 member states.

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Stefanie's work has led to more than 60 invited talks such as by Harvard University, and the publication of over 70 papers, columns and books with major publishing houses. ​​