Anna Karolina Chimiak is a doctoral researcher at the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University, starting in October 2025. She is part of the ERC-funded GROUNDOC project, which examines how grassroots actors in aparadigmatic transitional justice contexts develop innovative practices of documentation, truth-seeking, and memory preservation. Her research focuses on Mexico, where victims of gross human rights violations, particularly families of the disappeared, have emerged as central agents in documenting abuses in contexts marked by the collusion of state authorities and non-state actors, including organized crime. She examines how these autonomous documentation and search practices challenge and redefine the paradigm of transitional justice in a setting of ongoing violence and without a formal political transition.
Anna Karolina has over thirteen years of professional experience in human rights across Mexico, the Republic of Moldova, Spain and Poland, with expertise on enforced disappearances, torture, children’s rights and the protection of human rights defenders. Before joining the Justice Visions programme, she was a Co-director at the Centro de Justicia para la Paz y el Desarrollo (CEPAD) in Guadalajara, Mexico. In this role, she coordinated national and international advocacy strategies, provided legal, political and psychosocial accompaniment to victims, delivered conferences and workshops, and contributed to the strengthening of institutions, advocacy tools, policies and laws on enforced disappearances, human rights defenders, victims’ rights and children’s rights. She is the author and co-author of several reports, publications and columns on enforced disappearances, accountability, forensic crises and human rights institutions.
She holds two Integrated master’s degrees in Law and in Political Science from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, including an exchange programme at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. She also completed advanced diplomas at the Ibero-American University in Mexico in Human Rights and Transitional Justice, the Accusatory Criminal Justice System, and the diploma in Public Policy Advocacy.
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