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Lawyering before the European Court of Human Rights | with Veronika Fikfak
Description
Lawyering before the European Court of Human Rights
In this episode of Between Heat and Hope, Veronika Fikfak, professor of Human Rights and International Law at UCL, joins us to discuss the ‘European Human Rights Bar’, this is the network of lawyers that bring cases to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Having just completed an ERC Starting Grant and being about to start an ERC Consolidated Grant, Veronika has done extensive empirical work – both qualitative and quantitative – on the ECtHR. In this episode, she shares her great expertise on lawyering before the ECtHR and links it for us to current and future climate cases before the Strasbourg Court. We discuss opportunities and limits of bringing a climate case to the ECtHR, reflect on the consequences of the particularities of climate litigation in light of Veronika's research findings on the European Human Rights Bar in general, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the separation but also cooperation between domestic lawyers and their ECHR counterparts.
References
Recommendations
Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025).
Monica Feria-Tinta, A Barrister for the Earth: Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future (Faber, 2025).
About
Editing: Clara Kammeringer
Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit
Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, February 2026
The LitDem Project
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).