Office of the Vice-Dean for International Relations and Research

Elisenda Calvet Martínez is an assistant professor in Public International Law in the department of Criminal Law and Criminal Science, and Public International Law and International Relations at the University of Barcelona. She is also a coordinator of the legal clinic on the fight against impunity (as part of the UB’s Right to Rights programme). She has worked at the Spanish Red Cross, the Ombuds Office of Catalonia, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (San José, Costa Rica) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Geneva, Switzerland). She has acted as coordinator of the preparatory course for those beginning a diplomatic career (2015-17) and led a course on contemporary issues in Spanish foreign policy (2015-19) offered by the CEI International Affairs (Diplomatic School of Spain, in Barcelona).

In terms of research, Elisenda Calvet Martínez has completed research stays at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC) in the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven, Belgium) and at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. Her main lines of research are transitional justice, human rights, international humanitarian law and international criminal law. She has taken part in a number of research projects on human rights in Spain, and led two research projects for the International Catalan Institute for Peace (ICIP). At present, her research focuses on strengthening justice and democracy in Guatemala, sexual violence as genocide, and the impact of new technologies on transitional justice, such as the use of satellite images to document genocide in Myanmar.

Elisenda Calvet Martínez’s doctoral thesis on involuntary disappearances and transitional justice was brought out in 2018 by the publishing house Tirant lo Blanch and she has published the results of her research with leading international publishers, such as Oxford University Press and Routledge. She is a member of several organizations such as the International Association of Genocide Scholars and the COST Action on Global Atrocity Justice Constellations (Horizon 2020), and she sits on the council of reviewers for the journal Íconos Revista de Ciencias Sociales put out by FLACSO Ecuador.