[Spotlight] Meet NNHRR PhDs!

The Network has many PhD members, conducting innovative research on human rights. To get to know them and their research better, we interviewed them!

Oğuzhan Öztürk

Oğuzhan Öztürk is a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University. His research focuses on the right to protest of refugees and asylum seekers under International Law. It examines how, even though the Refugee Convention depoliticises refugees and the concept of refugeehood since the beginning of the Cold War, this depoliticisation has led to the creation of a passive portrayal of refugees in international politics. However, the demographics of refugees have shifted over the decades. Nowadays, refugees have never hesitated to speak out when necessary. Moreover, international human rights regimes may enable refugees and asylum seekers to claim their freedoms and rights. According to Oğuzhan, people should really know that, over the last decade, States have utilised the so-called refugee crisis to label refugees and asylum-seekers as the source of the problem and exclude them from the realm of the law in mandatory detention centres or at the borders. However, refugee rights are human rights. They have the same rights and freedoms as other citizens or non-citizens. Therefore, Oğuzhan discusses their right to protest under international law. On the practical application of his PhD, Oğuzhan said that, although human rights regimes may allow refugees and asylum-seekers to claim their freedoms of expression, assembly, and association, in practice, States may seem to restrict their activities, which are considered dangerous to the public. Yet, in the case law, as presented in Cisse et al. v. France before the European Court of Human Rights, their legal status or lack thereof, as asylum seekers and refugees, cannot be a justification for restricting their freedoms. A common misconception about his PhD is that refugees and asylum-seekers as non-citizens do not have freedoms or rights within host States. However, regional and international human rights instruments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention of Human Rights, grant freedoms to everyone within the territories of the Signatory States.

Lucy Gaynor

Lucy Gaynor is writing her PhD at the University of Amsterdam. She explores the construction and contestation of historical narratives within international criminal trials. She examines the testimonies of ‘historical expert witnesses’ at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She looks at how they were asked about history, how they narrated the historical context of the Rwandan Genocide, and how they tried to change, nuance, expand, or condense those narrations over time. The idea that justice mechanisms can narrate a kind of truth about human rights abuses and mass atrocity events is a recurring theme in international criminal law, genocide studies, transitional justice, and human rights discourse. She emphasises the importance of examining the processes by which actors within justice mechanisms construct narratives: to allow us to move beyond an emphasis solely on justice ‘outputs’. Secondly, Lucy aims to better address the issue of how justice mechanisms dealing with mass atrocities can produce narratives which are decried as problematic, incomplete, or incorrect: despite the best efforts of those involved. Her research hopefully humanises ‘justice spaces’ like the ICTR, and highlights the complexity of judging and narrating human rights abuses and mass atrocities. The most surprising outcome of Lucy’s PhD so far was that the most important element of a trial – when it comes to historical context – is not necessarily the evidence, but the interactions that happen in the courtroom. It is these interactions which dictate how evidence is understood and processed, and how history gets narrated. On the practical application of her research, Lucy said that the ICTR is often decried across the board as a problematic or even failed Tribunal. Historically speaking, she hopes to bring to light the nuances of its workings that help us to better understand why Tribunals like the ICTR can come to be seen as problematic, regardless of the verdict. Her aim is that her PhD’s methods can contribute to our understanding of other contexts, for example: how do different kinds of experts narrate their expertise? How do Amici Curiae, NGOs, and other groups interact with justice mechanisms? How is justice performed? These kinds of questions have relevance not only to historians or scholars, but to practitioners and participants. According to Lucy, a common misconception about her PhD is that trials, courts, and tribunals can be best studied either through their judgements alone, or exclusively by watching trials. While she is an enthusiastic and regular trial observer, she thinks that we do a disservice to these justice mechanisms to treat them purely as a means-to-an-end, to ‘eventify’ them, and only deeply analyse their final outputs. There is a richness to analysing trials through archives which brings up so many more questions, problems to solve, and approaches to justice to try, than might be apparent during the politically laden furore over justice-as-it-happens.

Priscilla Yovia

Priscilla Yovia is a PhD candidate at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance, and Society of Leiden University. Her PhD research focuses on adolescent sexual violence and the age of consent in Indonesia, specifically on how the age of consent framework has been conceptualised, and how related laws influence cases of sexual violence between adolescents. The human rights issue(s) addressed in this research are mainly related to children’s rights and also gender-based violence. Priscilla says that most often, when lawmakers construct laws related to children’s rights, they first assume protection without taking into account autonomy. The baseline assumption is that youth, especially those below 18 years old (legal age of consent), possess no autonomy, and they should first be protected. This brings a set of problems that extends to my research topic: What happens then, when a sexual crime occurs, where both the perpetrator and victim are below the legal age of consent? Does one protection then negate the others? This is a dynamic I am trying to see through my research, within the Indonesian context. On the practical application of her research, Priscilla said that it should provide lawmakers and criminal justice officials in Indonesia with clearer guidance on balancing children's rights protection and autonomy in cases of youth sexual violence. Ideally, future laws will avoid increasing youth status solely through protective measures. Instead, other factors like youth autonomy should also be taken into account. Finally, on a common misconception, Priscilla said that people often believe that criticising children’s rights and protective measures means we want to abolish the legal age of consent. That’s a wild and reaching accusation! Especially as a researcher of children’s rights that comes from a socio-legal background, she questions the assumption that changes happen automatically after a law is enacted and that legal measures are always safe. In reality, it is never that simple. Societal dynamics, in many cases, prove to be more complicated than that. Both the enactment and enforcement of children’s rights regulations are no exception.

Emma de Vries

Emma de Vries is conducting her PhD at Leiden University. Her research concerns the conceptualisation of academic freedom in European human rights law, in particular within the confines of the ECHR. She researches how a specific human right – academic freedom – can effectively be protected in a legal system in which its conceptualisation, position, and substance have so far hardly crystallised. Emma explores potential avenues in the ECHR for protecting academic freedom to find where it fits in different ECHR doctrines. When asked what people should really know about her PhD, Emma answered that it is of a theoretical rather than empirical nature, and that it is actually not about the situation in the US (as she often asked). While she is interested in knowing more about the ‘lived experiences’ of academics’ academic freedom and the empirical measurement of threats to academic freedom, and while the abhorrent attacks of the Trump administration on US (and our!) universities alarm her greatly, her main occupation in this research is to elucidate the legal norm – academic freedom’s place, scope, and substance – in the ECHR. On the practical application of her research Emma mentioned that, as it currently stands, bringing a claim to the ECtHR that concerns academic freedom is difficult to argue. What is the scope of academic freedom in the ECHR? What provisions can be relied on? And what may be argued in connection to which provision? What she hopes to achieve is to begin answering these questions by creating a more coherent and elaborate conceptualisation of academic freedom as a human right. This will hopefully better enable the litigation and adjudication of academic freedom cases before the ECtHR, and generally help our understanding of the concept. A common misconception is that academic freedom itself is often misconceived as the campus version of more general freedoms, such as the freedom of expression and the freedom to demonstrate. Academic freedom does not automatically protect expressions or protests whenever they happen on campus; Emma takes it to be more specific. Whoever wishes to justifiably claim academic freedom should be careful to argue on the basis of (factual) scientific evidence (even within one’s own expertise), to act in accordance with scientific ethics, and not seek out dogmatism, even when the ‘other’ position makes for discomfort.

David Patterson

David Patterson is a PhD candidate at the Groningen Centre for Health Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen. David’s PhD explores how human rights frameworks and language can strengthen climate action, with a focus on the right to health, drawing on his experience working to advance human rights-based approaches to the HIV pandemic in low- and middle-income countries. David discovered that the right to health is also an accepted concept in other disciplines such as medicine, without any reference to its basis in international law! Rather, it is seen as an ethical concept. He also found that public health colleagues are keen to collaborate to advance the right to health, for example through the European Public Health Association and in medical publications such as The Lancet. In order to increase the practical application of his PhD, David and public health colleagues are exploring how to strengthen scientific evidence of harms to physical and mental health in climate litigation. Following the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on Climate Change in July 2025, we have proposed a UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Climate Change, drawing on the experience of the 2001 UNGASS on HIV/AIDS. A common misconception about David’s area of research is that international human rights law is not useful because there is no enforcement mechanism. But the experience of human rights-based approaches to other global challenges, such as the HIV pandemic, prove otherwise. International guidelines on HIV/AIDS and human rights informed the UNGASS on HIV/AIDS. A UN-led soft law process followed to monitor States’ progress on HIV prevention and treatment, which continues today. The human rights framework also informed mechanisms for right-based funding such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, with community participation required at global and national levels. David thinks that we can adapt these approaches in our responses to climate change.