About.

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Dr. Stefanie Lemke is a scholar and a lawyer by training, with two decades of experience working on human rights and rule of law across the public and private sectors in Central Asia, Europe and Latin America, including governments, universities, NGOs, commercial law firms and international organizations like the United Nations. She studied law in Germany, France, Spain and Argentina and was trained as a judge, a prosecutor and a criminal defence lawyer in Germany, litigating high-profile cases before UN human rights bodies and the International Criminal Court. She completed a PhD on access to justice at Oxford, London and Cologne Universities. More details about her CV, you can find here    .

Stefanie has held various research and teaching positions and led a number of projects at Dutch, French, German, Spanish and UK universities.  She is both Elected Board Member and Secretary of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL), the world's leading and most active association to promote international comparative socio-legal research and teaching. She is also an research affiliate with Leeds University's Legal Professions Research Group (LPRG) and a secondary proposer for a EU-funded project highlighting the relevance of cultural expertise to law at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in London.

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Due to her expertise in her fields of research, Stefanie works regularly for the UN, the EU, the Council of Europe and the OSCE, taking over as team leader of projects, providing high-profile advice and delivering trainings. She is appointed to EU expert panels on civic space, victims' rights and capacity building for universities and  serves as the European Commission's national expert for Germany. She advised the Kazakh supreme court on judicial ethics, trained journalists in Turkmenistan, delivered workshops on fair trial standards to CSOs in Tajikistan and was commissioned to draft Europe's first guidelines on legal aid (which were adopted by the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers in 2021), among others. More about Stefanie's projects, you can find here.

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Stefanie has given more than 60 talks about her research at important conferences like at Harvard University and authored more than 70 academic articles, policy papers and columns as well as three books with major publishers. Her latest book 'Human Rights Lawyering in Europa' looks at the relationship between affordable access to justice and the provision of legal services to vulnerable groups.