Commission de Venise du Conseil de l'Europe

Associate Professor of Human Rights Law and Public International Law, Utrecht University

Dr Kushtrim Istrefi is Associate Professor of Public International Law and Human Rights Law, director of the master's programme in Public International Law, co-founder and coordinator of the Research Platform on Peace, Security and Human Rights, and substitute member of the Venice Commission.

Kushtrim has a general interest in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its intersection with international law and security. He has published on a wide range of topics related to human rights during peace, emergency and wartime, sanctions, counter-terrorism, statehood, accession to international organisations, issues of jurisdiction, sources of international law, and judicial activism. His edited volume Companion to the European Convention on Human Rights (Brill) features nearly 300 chapters on ECHR legal notions written by 90 authors, including judges of the Strasbourg Court and leading scholars in the field of the Convention system. He is also working on two other books, Human Rights Accountability of State Like and Non-Universally Recognised States (Edward Elgar) and the Politics of International Dispute Settlement (OUP) and a number of projects related to ECHR and international law.

Kushtrim serves on the editorial board of the European Convention on Human Rights Law Review and Ljubljana Law Review and is co-editor in chief of the ECHR Blog. He is a member of Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) and the Utrecht Centre for Accountability and Liability Law (Ucall).

Before joininig Utrecht University, Kushtrim taught at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, the VU University Amsterdam, the Riga Graduate School of Law and the University of Prishtina. He was a visiting fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law of Cambridge University, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies of Leiden University, the Max Planck Institute for International Law and the European Court of Human Rights. He holds a PhD from the University of Graz, LLM from the Riga Graduate School of Law and LLB from South East European University.

Next to academic work, Kushtrim has been involved in litigation of high-profile cases. He has successfully litigated the first case of enforced disappearance before the EULEX Human Rights Review Panel, served co-counsel in Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica v the Netherlands and Subašic and Others v the Netherlands before the European Court of Human Righs, provides legal advice in Müllner v. Austria, a leading climate change case before the ECtHR, and on the cases concerning the murder of journalists before the People's Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists. Kushtrim also contributed to a third-party intervention before the Strasbourg Court in the 'Academics for Peace' case and submitted an amicus curiae brief, at the invitation of the Kosovo Constitutional Court, in the case concerning the Association of Serb Majority Municipalities.

Kushtrim has advised States and non-State actors on issues related to peace, human rights and international law. Since May 2022 he serves as (external) chief legal advisor to Kosovo Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the accession of Kosovo to the Council of Europe. Furthermore, as a Senior Peace Fellow with Public International Law and Policy Group (a global pro bono law firm based in Washington DC) he has been involved in different peace projects, including more recently in relation to Ukraine.