Emma Várnagy is a doctoral researcher at the Human Rights Centre. After finishing her BA studies in Sociology at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary), she obtained her MA degree in Human Rights at Central European University (Vienna, Austria) and LLM in Public International Law and European Law at Utrecht University (Utrecht, The Netherlands). She completed her traineeship in the Research and Data Unit of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency in Vienna, following which she joined Amnesty Netherlands as a research assistant in its Police and Human Rights Program.
Emma participates in the multi-disciplinary iBOF project ‘Future-proofing Human Rights: Developing Thicker Forms of Accountability’ which seeks to identify a variety of avenues for achieving better human rights protection. She is also affiliated to the ERC-funded project ‘DISSECT: Evidence in International Human Rights Adjudication’. Her PhD research asks in which ways racial abuse may disappear from legal consciousness through lack or neglect of evidence in the ECtHR police violence case law. Her doctoral guidance committee consists of lead supervisor Professor Marie-Bénédicte Dembour (Ghent University) and Professors Tine Destrooper (Ghent University) and Angéla Kóczé (Central European University).
• Doctoral Researcher at the Human Rights Centre, Faculty of Law and Criminology, Ghent University (from October 2021)
• Teaching Assistant in the International and European Law LLB Programme at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (2020-2021)
• Program Assistant in the Police and Human Rights Program of Amnesty International Netherlands (2019-2021)
• Executive Editor, Utrecht Journal of International and European Law (2017-2019)
• Researcher, DemNet Foundational for Building Democratic Rights (2016-2017)
• Training assistant, Human Rights Education Group, Amnesty International Hungary (2012-2013)
University Degrees
• LLM, Public International Law, Utrecht University (2018)
• MA, Human Rights, Central European University (2016)
• BA, Sociology, Eötvös Loránd University (2015)
Internships
• Trainee, Fair and Equal Societies Program, Research and Data Unit, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2019)
• Progress Foundation Grant Recipient (2015)
• Winner of the social sciences section – sociology at the XXXIII. National Student Research Conference, with the research paper titled “Hate crimes – interrelations between public opinion and law enforcement” (2015)
• Joint 2nd place at the ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences Student Research Conference, nominating round for the biannual National competition (2014)
