Equity and Criminal Justice

About the Equity and Criminal Justice Working Group

The Equity and Criminal Justice Working Group was established in the autumn 2021, while the inaugural event that officially launched it took place on 26 January 2022. The Working Group’s main aim is to examine and promote discussion on pertinent questions relating to (in)equality, (in)equity and discrimination as found or generated in the setting of criminal justice. Criminal justice is one of the areas that can interfere with the individual’s freedoms and human rights, including equality, in the most drastic ways and hence merits careful scrutiny and monitoring. Furthermore, criminalisation (in the broader sense) and criminal justice mechanisms are often adopted and applied as strategies to tackle various socially undesirable phenomena outside of criminal justice institutions as well, thereby reproducing certain inequalities ingrained in many current criminal justice systems.

Through cross-border collaboration to address these issues internationally and comparatively, the Working Group is thus exploring issues intersecting equ(al)ity and criminal justice with a particular interest in comparative perspectives in order to draw lessons from national contexts and contribute to equity and equality-ensuring or -enhancing solutions more globally.

Current Projects

Group Archives

Who We Are

Co-Directors

  • Portrait of Denise Abade

    Denise Abade

    Denise Neves Abade is a federal prosecutor and a professor in the post-graduate program in Law, Justice, and Development at IDP (Brazilian Institute of Teaching, Development, and Research) and at Mackenzie University School of Law (São Paulo, Brazil). She holds a doctorate in Constitutional and Procedural Law from the University of Valladolid (Spain), and a master’s degree in Procedural Law from the University of São Paulo, where she graduated. She is also a professor at the Superior School of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (ESMPU) and at the National School for the Training and Improvement of Judges, both in Brazil. She is the Brazilian representative of the Network Specialized in Gender Issues of the Ibero-American Association of Public Prosecutors.
  • Portrait of Nina Persak

    Nina Persak

    Nina Persak holds a doctorate in law from University of Ljubljana, and an LL.M. and a M.Phil. (in social and developmental psychology), both, from University of Cambridge. She is Scientific Director and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for Criminal-Law Ethics and Criminology in Ljubljana and Full Professor of Law (University of Maribor, habilitation). Previously, she has been a research professor at the Faculty of Law, Ghent University (Belgium), Visiting Full Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Senior Fellow of the IAS CEU in Budapest (Hungary), held visiting scholarships/fellowships at Cambridge, Helsinki, Sofia, Essex and UC Berkeley, as well as various research or teaching positions in Slovenia. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Review of Penal Law (RIDP), a member of several other editorial and advisory boards of international journals, European Commission-appointed expert of its Expert Group on EU Criminal Policy, as well as an Independent Expert – scientific evaluator and ethics expert for various European Commission’s executive agencies, national and regional scientific funding bodies. Her main research interests lie in the areas of justice, criminalisation, human rights, social control, victimology, socio-legal studies and social psychology.

Student Assistants