Eva Brems teaches Advanced Study of Human Rights at the University of Ghent. She is Principal Investigator in the ERC Starting Grant project on ‘Strengthening the European Court of Human Rights: More Accountability through Better Legal Reasoning’ (2009-2014), the research team of which maintains a blog on the case law of the ECtHR (Strasbourg Observers) which serves as an important resource for the Grassrootsmobilise programme.

Louis-Léon Christians is Chair of the Law of Religions at the Université Catholique de Louvain, President of the multidisciplinary research institute on Religions, Spiritualities, Cultures and Societies and responsible for the multidisciplinary Masters Degree on the Science of Religions. He supervises a Marie Curie research project on Christian Orthodoxy and Human Rights.

Grace Davie is professor Emeritus of Exeter University and a distinguished sociologist of religion whose work on ‘believing but not belonging’ and ‘vicarious religion’ has influenced an entire generation of students of religion in Europe.

Malcolm Evans OBE is a jurist and professor of public international law at the University of Bristol Law School and has written extensively on religious freedom in the European Court of Human Rights setting.

Marie-Claire Foblets is Director of the Department of Law & Anthropology, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and coordinator of the FP7 RELIGARE project (2010-2013) on Religious Diversity and Secular Models in Europe – Innovative Approaches to Law and Policy.

Read more »

Haldun Gülalp recently retired as Professor of Political Science at Yıldız Technical University, and is currently chair of the Global Studies and Class Strategies (GSCS) research group, in Istanbul, Turkey. He holds doctoral degrees in Economics from Ankara University and in Sociology from Binghamton University.

Matthias Koenig is professor of sociology of religion at the University of Göttingen and a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. His current research focuses on the role of law in the civic integration of religious minorities; in that context, he is studying litigation and jurisprudence at the ECtHR and their impact upon domestic arrangements of secularism and public religion.

Nikos Kokosalakis is professor Emeritus of Liverpool University and Panteion University (Athens), and has worked extensively on the relationship between religion and national identity and church and state in Orthodox settings, from theological and sociological perspectives.

Dilek Kurban is the Marie Curie Fellow at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and the Turkey expert of the European Commission’s Network of Independent Experts in the non-discrimination field. Before joining the Hertie School, she was the Mercator-IPC Fellow at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin. Her work focuses on minority rights, media freedom and anti-discrimination in Turkey, as well as European human rights law.

It is with great sadness that we report the loss of a much-valued member of our Advisory Board and a great, in every sense of the term, sociologist of religion, David Martin. David was amongst the first readers of the draft proposal for the Grassrootsmobilise research programme, at a time when his support and enthusiasm were invaluable to Effie Fokas. He will be greatly missed by a broad community touched by his work and life. Another member of our Advisory Board – Grace Davie – reflects on his rich life here.

Javier Martínez-Torrón is professor of law at Complutense University (Madrid) and holds a PhD  in canon law. In the field of religion, he focuses on conscientious objection, the historical influence of canon law on the Anglo-American legal tradition, the international protection of religious freedom and, specifically, ECtHR religious freedoms jurisprudence.

Pål Repstad is Professor of Sociology of Religion at the University of Agder, Norway, and an expert in qualitative research methods. He advised the FP7-funded Welfare and Values in Europe (WaVE) project in this capacity with insights which are highly useful for the present programme as well.

Julie Ringelheim is Professor of international human rights law and sociology of law at the Université Catholique de Louvain. She has worked extensively on the concept of reasonable accommodation, in the ECtHR context and beyond, with the aim to elaborate a new conception of equality law that would be able to respond fairly and consistently to three essential challenges faced by contemporary societies, namely ‘non-discrimination,’ ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition.’

Lucy Vickers is professor of Law at Oxford Brookes Univ. UK. She works especially on issues of religious discrimination in the workplace and is the author of a report for the European Commission on Religion and Belief Discrimination in Employment.