Maria Jose Luque Macias is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral (MSCA) Fellow, conducting research at the Human Rights Centre, Ghent University, under the supervision of Prof. Clara Burbano Herrera.
After obtaining her first law degree at the UCSG, in Guayaquil, Ecuador, she relocated to Germany to pursue her LL.M (magna cum laude) at Universität Potsdam. Subsequently, she conducted her doctoral research at the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (DAAD and DAAD-STIBET scholarships for foreign doctoral candidates). Under the title Re-Politicising International Investment Law in Latin America through the Duty to Regulate Paradigm, she published her monograph in Springer (2021), as a part of EYIEL Monographs – Studies in European and International Economic Law.
Since her post-doctoral stage, Dr. Luque engages with the study of the human rights and environment debate. Initially, she has explored this nexus within the context of the Inter-American Comission on Human Rights‘ admissibility of climate change petitions and OECD specific instances at the FAU Erlangen- Nürnberg (funded by the Ilse-Mayer Foundation) and Universität Trier (funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation), respectively.
With her project NGOsteertIACtHR, she will now examine the influence of NGOs’ agenda-setting power on the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) relating to environmental matters. This includes contentious cases involving indigenous people, human rights defenders, the right to a healthy environment, as well as pertinent advisory opinions.
She is a member of the Programme for Studies on Human Rights in Context.
