MARIA-LOUIZA DEFTOU
Maria-Louiza Deftou is a Teaching Fellow at the School of Law of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and an active researcher at the Athens Public International Law Center (AthensPIL) with a multifold involvement in academic life. She has participated in a number of EU-funded research and teaching projects: as a teaching associate in the European Union Jean Monnet Module ‘Migration Flows: Challenges and Perspectives under International and EU Law’ and as a research and teaching associate in the Jean Monnet Network programme ‘Migration and Asylum Policies Systems(MAPS)’ (2019-2022). She has also participated, as a member of the research team, in the research projects “Borderless Challenges: Redefining Sovereignty” (2020-2022) and “EU Maritime Security Post-2020” (2021-2024), both funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation(HFRI).
She holds a PhD from the School of Law of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, an LLB from the same university, and a Master 2 Research in Human Rights Law from Université Lumière Lyon 2. During her PhD, she was a visiting researcher at the Université Paris II Pantheon-Assas and presented her work at a range of international conferences and workshops.
Maria-Louiza’s expertise lies in international human rights law and international migration law, and she has published extensively in these fields. Her first monograph, titled “Exporting the European Convention on Human Rights”, was published with Hart Publishing in 2022. In addition to her academic interests, she is a qualified lawyer with the Athens Bar Association. She has also worked for the International Organization for Migration (IOM-UN Migration) and the Marangopoulos Foundation for Human Rights (MFHR). She is currently an active member of the International Law Association (ILA) Committee on the ‘Protection of People at Sea’, in the context of which she conducts research on the application of human rights in the maritime domain.
Email: mardeftou[at]law.uoa[dot]gr.