Dr Dilek Kurban

Dilek Kurban is a Fellow and Lecturer at the Hertie School in Berlin. She obtained her PhD from Maastricht University Faculty of Law in 2018. Her dissertation received the Erasmus Dissertation Prize 2019 in the Netherlands. She also holds a Juris Doctor (JD) from Columbia Law School and a Master in International Affairs (MIA) from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Her research interests include supranational human rights courts, state violence, legal mobilisation and judicial politics, with a particular focus on authoritarian regimes and a regional focus on Turkey. She is the author of Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Kurban’s research is also published in edited volumes and in peer-reviewed journals, including Human Rights Law Review and Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Her research received funding from Columbia University, the European Commission (the Marie Curie and FP programs) and Mercator Stiftung. During 2012-2019, as the Turkey expert of the Network of Independent Experts in the Non-Discrimination Field, she reported to the European Commission. Before transitioning to academia, during 2005-2013, she engaged in policy-oriented research at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), most recently as the Director of its Democratisation programme. During the same period, she wrote regular columns in Turkey’s leading newspapers and frequently appeared on international media to discuss her research and to comment on human rights and democratisation in Turkey. Earlier in her career, Kurban worked as an Associate Political Affairs Officer at the United Nations Department of Political Affairs in New York.