Role: Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute for Human Rights, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
Finland

  Contact: Mikaela.heikkila@abo.fi

 Scholarship:
Sexual Violence | Victim Rights | International Criminal Law

Mikaela Heikkilä is working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Åbo Akademi University Institute for Human Rights. Her areas of academic interest include victim rights, with a focus on victims of sexual violence, international criminal law, and the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. Her recent research has focused on questions of the EU’s criminal justice cooperation (especially regarding international crimes terrorism) and migration control within the EU-FP7 FRAME project on the EU’s commitment to human rights (2013–2017). She now works as part of a newly launched project, “RELAY: Vulnerability as Particularity: Towards Relativizing the Universality of Human Rights?” (Academy of Finland, 2017–2021), which aims to contribute to unpacking the notion of vulnerability in order to analyze its function in the interpretation of law. Heikkilä intends to apply her expertise on victim-friendly proceedings and restorative justice to bring a new perspectives to the human rights discourse on vulnerability. Mikaela is particularly interested in how legal categorizations and paradigms function within a vulnerability framework.