New Visiting Researcher at MOBILE - Christoph Sperfeldt
Christoph Sperfeldt is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie Law School, Macquarie University. He is also Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University, Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness and Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law at the Royal University of Law and Economics in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Christoph pursues socio-legal research in areas of human rights and justice that is empirically grounded with a geographical focus on Southeast Asia. A particular focus of his research has been on transitional justice and statelessness. His monograph Practices of Reparations in International Criminal Justice (CUP 2022) examines the first attempts of international criminal courts to provide reparations to victims of mass atrocities. Christoph’s interest in statelessness and legal identity arose from multi-year field research in Cambodia. He has advised the UNHCR and is member of a UN International Expert Group on a study on undocumented populations in Sabah, Malaysia, as well as an Advisory Group member for the Regional Coalition on Statelessness Asia.
Prior to joining academia, Christoph worked for more than a decade on human rights and transitional justice in Southeast Asia. He was Deputy Director at the Asian International Justice Initiative, a joint program of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University and the East-West Center, where he supported human rights and justice sector capacity development in ASEAN. Prior to this, he was Senior Advisor with the German development agency (GIZ) in Cambodia. Since 2022, Christoph has been Visiting Professor with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, supporting human rights education and training at Cambodian universities. He holds a PhD from the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Australian National University.
Christoph will be a visitor at MOBILE from 7 August to 3 September 2023.