The team

Veronika Fikfak leads the Human Rights Nudge and Break the Bias projects. She is Professor of Human Rights and International Law at University College London, School of Public Policy and a co-Director of the UCL Institute for Human Rights. She holds academic positions also at the iCourts Centre of Excellence, University of Copenhagen and at the University of Oslo. Her research interests are in international law, human rights, and public law, focusing on reparations, execution of judgments, and access to justice. She acts as judge ad hoc at the European Court of Human Rights.

Alexandra Glarner is a Research Assistant on the Break the Bias project, researching access to human rights justice with a particular focus on France and Switzerland. She is also a PhD candidate at the University of Zurich. Her doctoral research examines access to justice in environmental and climate matters from a comparative perspective, identifying barriers to access to justice and exploring avenues for reform.

Maria Koniarz is a Research Assistant on the BREAKtheBIAS project, where she has worked since May 2026. Her focus is on access to human rights justice in the UK and Poland, collecting and analysing case law and mapping the pathways through which claimants bring their claims.

Julien Moriceau is a socio-legal scholar working on legal pluralism, human rights, and customary justice systems. His research combines legal analysis with ethnographic methods and draws on fieldwork conducted mainly in Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Julien holds a PhD in Law from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He is an External Lecturer at the Université de Lille and the Université catholique de Lille (France). He previously taught at Aix-Marseille Université (France) and the Université de Ngozi (Burundi).

Alongside his academic work, he has nearly twenty years of experience as a practitioner working on access-to-justice and justice-reform projects and policies, as well as on evaluation. He has worked with NGOs (Lawyers Without Borders, Search for Common Ground, Anti-Slavery International, among others), international organisations (UNDP, IOM, the ICRC, among others), and governmental institutions, including Ministries of Justice in Algeria, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Edward Pérez is a PhD candidate at the UCL Faculty of Laws, researching the scope and potential of structural remedies issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and critically examining their legitimacy, effectiveness and implementation within states. His work contributes to wider debates on the role of human rights courts in promoting democratic resilience and social justice in Latin America. He holds a law degree from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Venezuela), an LLM from the University of Cambridge and an MPP from Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). He has served as a staff attorney at the Inter-American Court, senior legal adviser at the Center for Reproductive Rights, and consultant for international organisations and NGOs.

Rachel Sloth-Nielsen specialises in international children's rights law. Her doctoral work at the University of Oxford examined the child's right to preservation of cultural identity under Article 8 of the UNCRC. She has worked on children's access to justice and child-friendly justice, including empirical research on admissibility and barriers to children's access to justice under the UNCRC individual complaints procedure.

Niamh Sutton is the Lab Coordinator and Post-Award Research Coordinator in UCL's Department of Political Science, where she manages a portfolio of research projects and coordinates compliance, staffing and engagement activities. She holds a BA in Economics, Politics and Law from Dublin City University and began her career in higher education at the University of Birmingham, working on the ERDF-funded DEMAND Hub and the West Midlands Health Tech Innovation Accelerator. She joined UCL in 2024, first supporting the NIHR-funded ARC North Thames.

Dr Umut Yüksel is a Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at University College London and a Research Associate at the Global Governance Centre of the Geneva Graduate Institute. Within the BREAKtheBIAS project, he is mainly responsible for data collection and quantitative analysis.