Dr Mando Rachovitsa

PhD (Nottingham)
Assistant Professor of Public International Law

Brief academic background

Mando has received her Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham (UK) on the topic of fragmentation of international law. She is currently an Assistant Professor of International law at the University of Groningen. She was previously an Assistant Professor of International Law at Qatar University where she taught international law and human rights (2013-2016). She has taught as a visitor at many universities in the Middle East and the University of Rwanda. She was the Lecturer of the Year (Faculty of Law, University of Groningen, 2017) making her the first woman, international member of staff and non-Dutch speaker to get this award in the Faculty of Law.

Research Interests

Mando researches in the areas of international law, human rights law and international technology law.
With regard to international law, she writes on interpretational and jurisdictional issues before international courts with a keen eye on comparing the practice of different international courts. She is particularly interested in African human rights law and the case law of the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights.

Within the area of international technology law, she writes on the following topics:

  • human rights-based design and implementation of AI decision-making
    international law & cybersecurity standards
    human rights assessment of the use of new technologies, including issues of encryption, and digital ID systems
  • international law & cybersecurity standards
  • human rights assessment of the use of new technologies, including issues of encryption, and digital ID systems
  • how international law-like standards are created and used to assess the work of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in the domain names’ space
  • how human rights law may inform the design of Internet standards

Mando is currently working on the project “Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance” funded by the Dutch Research Council investigating the role of public values in the design of cybersecurity policy norms and standards for IoT.

You can read more about her publications here

For details on the project she is working at the moment see here

Practicing | Advising | Consulting

Mando is a barrister and solicitor (Greece, 2006 – present) (currently non-practicing). 

She is also the legal advisor for Binary, a non-profit organisation on digital rights in Greece.

Mando has advised the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, and the Ministry of Interior of Qatar on Internet regulation and policy. She has given expert input to the UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy regarding the draft legal instrument on government surveillance and privacy and provided written comments. She was a participant to the Research Group on Human Rights Protocols Considerations (Internet Research Task Force) drafting human rights related guidelines to be considered by the engineering community when creating and updating Internet standards.

More on consulting here

Publications

Rachovitsa & Johann, ‘The Use of AI in the Digital Welfare State and Lessons Learned from the SyRI Case’ (2022) 22 Human Rights Law Review 1-15

Rachovitsa, ‘Léon Mugesera: A Convicted Genocidaire, Seeks Justice before the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Court’s Judicial Function in Default Judgments’ 2022 Harvard Human Rights Journal (online)

Rachovitsa, ‘On New “Judicial Animals”: The Curious Case of an African Court with Material Jurisdiction of Global Scope’ (2019) 19 Human Rights Law Review 255-289

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