Team
The Centre’s members are based in Universities in Czech Republic, Ireland, UK and Italy. Membership will be open to members of the Masaryk University from the Law Faculty, but also from other departments and faculties that engage in migration and judicial studies research.
The Centre’s Director is Dr Madalina Moraru, who ia a Lecturer in EU law at the Law Faculty of the Masaryk University and a member of the Judicial Studies Institute; she is also a part-time Assistant Professor on EU law at the Centre for Judicial Cooperation of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; member of the Odysseus Academic Network for Legal Studies on Immigration and Asylum in Europe; and Research Affiliate at the Refugee Law Initiative, University of London. Her research focuses on: asylum and immigration, EU citizenship, consular and diplomatic protection, role of courts in shaping migration governance, and rule of law and fundamental rights.
Team members
Thekli Anastasiou
is a teaching fellow in public law at the University of Surrey and is due to complete her PhD in public international law in 2022 at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests migration in the context of climate change, international refugee law and international human rights law. She has contributed to organising various conferences, including the annual conference of the International Law Association British branch in 2022. She is also an active member of the Refugee Law Initiative and the Sheffield Migration Research Centre.
Cristina Dallara
Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Bologna, Department of Political and Social Sciences; Associated professor at the Post-Graduate School on Public Administration Studies (Spisa-Unibo); Instructor at the National School of the Magistracy of Italy (Scandicci-Florence). Her research interests are asylum adjudications, the role of courts in migration, political and judicial studies.
Dr Brid Ni Ghrainne
is the Centre’s Deputy, and Senior Researcher at the Judicial Studies Institute, Masaryk University; Assistant Professor at Maynooth University; Senior Affiliate and Lecturer at the Refugee Law Initiative, University of London; Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague; Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading.
Linda Janku
is a senior lawyer at the Czech Ombudsman Office, responsible for the agenda of asylum and migration law. She also teaches at the Refugee Law Clinic and Asylum and Migration Law courses at the Faculty of Law, Masaryk University. She is also a member of the Committee for the Rights of Foreigners of the Council of the Government of the Czech Republic for Human Rights. Linda has a Ph.D. in Public International and European Law at the Faculty of Law, Masaryk University and specialises in migration and refugee law, statelessness and human rights. She was an editor in chief of the Czech Quarterly on Migration and Human Rights.
Alice Lacchei
is a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. She was a honor student in Political Science at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa), where she collaborated with the research team DREAM (Data, REsearch and Analysis on Migration). In 2019 she earned a Masters degree in International Studies (curriculum Governance of Migration) from the University of Pisa. In her PhD project she investigates how discretion influences asylum adjudications in lower courts, by focusing on Italy and France, due to their different organizational arrangements. Using ethnographic methods, she studies judges dealing with asylum adjudication though the lens of the street-level bureaucracy. She especially focuses on practices adopted by judges and courts, in order to consider the individual and collective dimension of discretion, as well as the relation between these dimensions.
Hana Lupacova
currently working at Migration, Justice and Finances Department at the Office of Public Defendor of Human Rights and as a teacher of the Refugee Law Clinic at the Masaryk University, previously a judicial clerk at the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. She has worked as an expert researcher for the IARMJ.