About.

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Dr. Stefanie Lemke is a socio-legal scholar and a human rights practitioner. In a career spanning almost two decades, 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, Oxford University, 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. More details about Stefanie's CV, you can find here    .

Stefanie completed a PhD on Access to Justice at Oxford, London and Cologne Universities and was trained as a judge, a public prosecutor and a criminal defence lawyer in Germany, litigating high-profile cases before UN human rights treaty bodies and the International Criminal Court. She holds several research, advisory and supervisory roles. She is the director and founder of The Rule of Law Initiative, a platform promoting people-centred justice and creating community for female human rights practitioners and scholars, an associate fellow with Leeds University's Legal Profession Research Group, and a secondary proposer for a large-scale project funded by the European Cooperation in Science & Technology (COST). She is a board member of Lodz University's Eastern Block Censorship Research Group overseeing its platform on media freedom and media pluralism, and is elected for a 4-term to the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL), the world's leading organisation for everyone working on law and society.

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A recognized expert in her field, Stefanie regularly collaborates with international organizations like the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe and the EU. She is the European Commission's National Expert for Germany, advises the Council of Europe's Office in Ukraine on criminal justice reform and is appointed to various EU expert committees promoting civic space, gender equality and digitalisation, among others. She was commissioned to draft Europe's first guidelines on legal aid, which were adopted by the Council of Europe's 46 member states in 2021. More about Stefanie's projects and her work in Albania, Laos, Tajikistan, Turkey and many other countries, you can find here.​​​​

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Stefanie's work has led to a number of invited talks such as at Harvard University and the publication of more than 70 papers, columns and books with major publishers. ​​