dr Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias

assistant professor

dr Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias

Dr Gliszczyńska-Grabias graduated from the Faculty of Law and Administration of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. In 2012, at the Institute of Legal Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, she defended her doctoral dissertation on counteracting antisemitism through the instruments of international law. Her research interests focus on the issues of the UN human rights protection system, anti-discrimination law, freedom of expression and its limits, transitional justice and legal governance over memory and history.

She is co-editor and co-author of Constitutionalism under Stress (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Law and Memory: Towards Legal Governance of History (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She has held fellowships at Cambridge University, Yale University, Hebrew University and the European University Institute.

Dr. Gliszczyńska-Grabias has participated in more than a dozen international and national research and grant projects. From 2016 to 2019 she led the Polish part of the international research consortium MELA – ‘Memory Laws in European and Comparative Perspective’, granted by the Humanities in the European Research Area. Currently she co-heads international research consortium ‘The Challenge of Populist Memory Politics for Europe: Towards Effective Responses to Militant Legislation on the Past’ (2021 – 2024), funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung.

Winner of the Minister of Science and Higher Education’s Award for Outstanding Young Scholars, between 2015-2018 she also participated in the works of the Council of Young Scholars, an advisory and expert body to the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education.

Since the beginning of her academic and expert work, she has focused on the issue of countering antisemitism and the legal aspects of Holocaust memory politics in Europe. Her doctoral dissertation entitled Countering Antisemitism. Instruments of International Law was awarded a honourable mention in the Manfred Lachs competition for the best publications by Polish authors in the field of public international law and published by Wolters Kluwer in 2014. She has conducted research on various aspects of antisemitism, among others, under grants awarded by the Rothschild Foundation, the CEE Trust of the Open Society Foundations, the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism of the Hebrew University, the Indiana University Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry of the Tel Aviv University. She is the author of dozens of scholarly publications on methods to counter antisemitism and several dozen expert reports on the subject. Among other things, she was involved in the development of the 2022 guidelines for a national strategy to counter antisemitism in Poland, coordinated by Polish NGOs and the American Jewish Committee CEE.

For more than 15 years, she has been providing expert support to international organisations, including the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the Fundamental Rights Agency, the institutions of the UN human rights system, and numerous non-governmental organisations: the American Jewish Committee, the World Jewish Congress, the European Jewish Congress, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), B’nai B’irth International, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, Stefan Batory Foundation, Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, Jewish Czulent Association, Forum for Dialogue, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Right, and the Jewish Religious Community of Warsaw. For more than 10 years, she has been a member of the Programme Council of “Open Republic”, Association against Antisemitism and Xenophobia. From 2015 to 2018 she was an expert at the Council of Europe’s HELP in the 28 programme, working on a project on hate speech and hate crimes. From 2010 to 2011, she was a fellow at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, at Yale University.

Selected publications:

2023: Right to historical truth and the 2018 Amendments to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance Act. Noam Tirosh and Anne Reading (eds.), Right to Memory. New York: Berghahn Books, 112-131 (with Grażyna Baranowska).
2023: Is It Polexit Yet? Comment on Case K 3/21 of 7 October 2021 by the Constitutional Tribunal of Poland. European Constitutional Law Review 19(1): 1-19 (with Wojciech Sadurski).
2022: Intersection of Conflicting Values: Symbols of Memory and Acts of Artistic Expression. East European Politics and Societies 2022.
2022: The Missing Post-Holocaust Traces in Recent Case Law of the European Courts. Polish Yearbook of International Law XLI: 213-234.
2021: The Judgment That Wasn’t (But Which Nearly Brought Poland to a Standstill): ‘Judgment’ of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal of 22 October 2020, K1/20. European Constitutional Law Review 17(1): 130-53 (with Wojciech Sadurski).
2021: Memory Laws and Memory Wars in Poland, Russia and Ukraine . Jahrbuch des Öffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart 69(1): 95-116 (with Uladzislau Belavusau and Maria Mälksoo).
2021: ‘Never Again’ as a Cornerstone of the Strasbourg System: The Reminiscence of the Holocaust in the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights . Helmut Ast, Esra Demir (eds.), The European Court of Human Rights: Current Challenges in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 200-20.
2020: The Remarkable Rise of ‘Law and Historical Memory’ in Europe: Theorising Tendencies and Prospects in the Recent Literature. Journal of Law&Society 47(2): 325-38 (with Uladzislau Belavusau).
2019: Deployments of Memory with the Tools of Law – the Case of Poland. Review of Central and East European Law 44(4): 464-92.
2019: Counteracting Antisemitism with the Tools of Law: an Effort Doomed to Failure? Armin Lange and Dina Porat (eds.), Comprehending and Confronting Antisemitism. A Multi-Faceted Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter, 489-502.
2018: Right to Truth and Memory Laws: General Rules and Practical Implications. Polish Political Science Yearbook 47(1): 97–109 (with Grażyna Baranowska).
2018: Governmental Xenophobia’ and Crimmigration: European States’ Policy and Practices towards ‘the Other’. No-Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice 15:74-100 (with Witold Klaus).
2017: A recent decision of the US Supreme Court on legal discrimination in the access to voting rights: Five readings of Shelby County. Antidiscrimination Law Review 1 (with Wojciech Sadurski).
2017: „Homosexual propaganda” Bans as a Litmus Test for the Acceptance of Liberal and International Human Rights Norms in the Post-Communist States. Baltic Yearbook of International Law 15(1): 268-84 (with Anna Śledzińska-Simon).
2016: Communism Equals or Versus Nazism?: Europe’s Unwholesome Legacy in Strasbourg. East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 30(1): 74-96.
2016: Law of Ritual Slaughter and the Principle of Religious Equality. Journal of Law, Religion and State 4(3): 233-66 (with Wojciech Sadurski).