Dr. Veronika Fikfak is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. She was previously a Senior Lecturer, Homerton College, University of Cambridge. She holds a Magister Juris and an M.Phil and D.Phil from the University of Oxford. She previously worked at the International Court of Justice, the Law Commission of England and Wales, the European Court of Human Rights and at the UN in Paris.
Dr. Fikfak’s research focuses on international human rights institutions, in particular on the European Court of Human Rights. In this context, she is especially interested in the law of remedies for human rights violations. She recently concluded working on a project funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and the Newton Trust entitled ‘What Price for Human Rights: Compensating human rights violations’. The project used quantitative and qualitative research methods to analyse the jurisprudence of the European Court in order to understand how the European Court of Human Rights determines compensation in human rights claims. The results of the project were published in the European Journal of International Law.
Whilst at the NYU, Dr Fikfak will start work on her next project ‘A Nudge in the Rights Direction? Redesigning the Architecture of Human Rights Remedies’, which is funded by the European Research Council. The project, which builds on Dr Fikfak’s work on damages, seeks to understand how different remedies affect the way states comply with human rights requirements and incorporate them into their own domestic laws. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research in six countries, the project will reveal the dynamics of compliance or non-compliance and the efficacy of different types of remedies in changing the behaviour of human rights violators. The central aim of the project is to identify options for new remedies – incentives or nudges – which human rights institutions can use to deter future violations. Using the example of the European Court of Human Rights and its caselaw, the research will build on insights from behavioural economics to question widespread theories about monetisation of human rights, public shaming, and deference shown to states in the specification of remedies.