The EU announced today that Dr Veronika Fikfak has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant with a value of €1.5m from the European Commission.
Her project, entitled 'A Nudge in the Rights Direction? Redesigning the Architecture of Human Rights Remedies' seeks to understand how different remedies affect the way states comply with human rights requirements and incorporate them into their own domestic laws. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research in six countries, the project will reveal the dynamics of compliance or non-compliance and the efficacy of different types of remedies in changing the behaviour of human rights violators. The central aim of the project is to identify options for new remedies - incentives or nudges - which human rights institutions can use to deter future violations. Using the example of the European Court of Human Rights and its caselaw, the research will build on insights from behavioural economics to question widespread theories about monetisation of human rights, public shaming, and deference shown to states in the specification of remedies.
The ERC received over 3,100 proposals from researchers around the world. Only a handful of lawyers were successful in this call. The ERC praised Dr Fikfak's proposal as 'highly creative and innovative', 'ground-breaking' and as going beyond the traditional 'state of the art'. Seven reviewers were unanimous that the project promised to generate 'significant outcomes' for human rights and international law. The project will bring together social scientists, behavioural economists and computer scientists from across the EU. It will start in 2019 and run for five years.
ERC Starting Grants are designed to support excellent researchers at the beginning of their career and enable them to form their own independent research team or programme. Researchers must demonstrate the ground-breaking nature, ambition and feasibility of their scientific proposal. Scientific excellence is the sole criterion on the basis of which ERC frontier research grants are awarded. Proposals of an interdisciplinary nature, which cross the boundaries between different fields of research, pioneering proposals addressing new and emerging fields of research or proposals introducing unconventional, innovative approaches and scientific inventions are particularly encouraged.
Not only does this show the high quality of Veronika’s own work, but it shows the continuing high standing of the research conducted in British universities among our European colleagues. Professor John Bell
Chair of the Faculty of Law, Professor John Bell, commented:
"The award of this grant from the ERC is a stunning achievement by Veronika Fikfak. Only one in every eight evaluated projects across the EU are funded by the ERC. Not only does this show the high quality of Veronika’s own work, but it shows the continuing high standing of the research conducted in British universities among our European colleagues. We welcome the UK Government’s declared objective to continue to participate in European research schemes, and in the ERC in particular, for many years to come."
