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Biography
Mando is an Associate Professor in Human Rights Law.
She is the Deputy Director of the Human Rights Law Centre.
Mando holds a degree in law (Democritus University of Thrace, Greece) and an LLM (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece). She obtained her PhD in International Law from the University of Nottingham.
Mando joined the University of Nottingham in 2023. Prior to that she was an Assistant Professor of International Law at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands (2016-2023) and an Assistant Professor of International Law at Qatar University, Qatar (2013-2016).
Mando's expertise lies in the areas of human rights law and technology law. She researches the intersection between human rights law and technology, including digital human rights, and human rights-based design for cybersecurity standards and algorithmic systems. She has written on the human rights assessment of the use of new technologies, including encryption, and digital ID systems, and how human rights law may inform the design and implementation of Internet standards. She has also published on how international law-like standards are created and used to assess the legality and legitimacy of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) work in the domain names' space.
Mando is also systematically writing on comparative human rights law bringing together the case law of the 3 regional courts of human rights (European, Inter-American and African) regarding interpretational, jurisdictional and substantive issues. She is particularly interestedin the case law of the African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights.
Mando's experience includes research and academic visits at the University of Rwanda (2022), Melbourne Law School, Institute for International Law and the Humanities (2019). She was also a Fellow at UC Berkeley - Centre for Technology, Society & Policy (2015-2016). She has served as a reviewer for studies commissioned by the European Parliament on digital technologies and for the Dutch Research Council (Domain Social Sciences and Humanities). Mando publishes extensively in high-regarded journals, including International & Comparative Law Quarterly, Human Rights Law Review, Harvard Human Rights Journal, International Journal of Law & Information Technology. She is a qualified lawyer in Greece since 2006 (currently non-practicing).
Mando was part of the project "Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance" funded by the Dutch Research Council investigating the role of public values in the design of cybersecurity policy norms and standards for IoT. The project brings together the humanities, computer science and international law in order to better understand and investigate the relationship between societal values and ICT standards on products, services and processes. Her contribution concerned the role of international law and human rights in drafting, creating and implementing standards before international formal and informal standardisation bodies. In the past she was awarded a grant by Qatar University to research the protection of privacy online from a legal and technical point of view. The research outputs include an original scholarly article (please see publications list) highlighting the reasons that policy-makers should value privacy online.
Mando's research engages and impacts policy-making and law-making. She has advised governmental stakeholders, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands on its international cybersecurity policy and the Ministry of Interior of Qatar on cybersecurity and digital human rights issues. Recently, she submitted a brief to the Scottish government advising on incorporating digital human rights in the draft Scottish human rights bill.
She has also experience engaging and advising International non-governmental stakeholders. Recently, she submitted a policy brief to the UN Global Digital Compact on Setting a Human Rights Compliant Legal Framework for the Use of Spyware. In the past, she contributed to the Open Consultation on the UN Group of Government Experts regarding responsible State behaviour in cyberspace on the topic of human rights law and cyberspace. Since 2015, she is a participant in the research group of the Internet Engineering Task Force - the global standardisation body creating Internet standards - directly informing the work of the computer engineering community on the compatibility of the creation and implementation of Internet standards with human rights law. She is also the legal advisor for Binary, a non-profit organisation on digital rights in Greece working on disseminating the value of digital rights in civil society.
ORCID Mando Rachovitsa
Google Scholar Profile
Open Access publications: RIS - University of Nottingham Research Outputs
Expertise Summary
Mando's expertise lies in the areas of human rights law and technology law. She researches the intersection between human rights law and technology, including digital human rights, and human rights-based design for cybersecurity standards and algorithmic systems. Mando is also systematically writing on comparative human rights law bringing together the case law of the 3 regional courts of human rights (European, Inter-American and African) regarding interpretational, jurisdictional and substantive issues.
Teaching Summary
Mando is happy to supervise students in the following areas:
- International and regional human rights law
- Technology law and human rights
- Cybersecurity and human rights
Mando currently convenes and teaches the International Human Rights Law module at the postgraduate programme.
While working at the University of Groningen, she convened and taught the LLM module Settlement of International Disputes (2017-2023), the LLB Human Rights Moot Court module (2016-2020) and she was involved in teaching the Introduction to International & European Law, the Public International Law and the Research Seminar on International Law LLB modules (2016-2020). She designed and taught a series of lectures and modules in the intersection of technology and law in the context of offering a specialised tech law track within the existing LLB in International & European Law programme. In particular, she designed and taught the lectures and seminars on digital rights in the Data Protection & Human Rights module, a part of the Research Seminar on Technology Law module and the Intellectual Property module.
Innovation & Leadership in Teaching
In 2017, she was elected the Lecturer of the Year in the Faculty of Law, University of Groningen. She is the first woman and first international member of staff and non-Dutch speaker to get this award in the Faculty of Law up to this day.
Teaching global classrooms (especially in non-Western institutions)
Mando have acquired extensive experience in teaching global classrooms, especially in non-Western institutions, including at Qatar University where she designed and taught the Public International Law and Human Rights Law modules (2013-2016). She has also given a series of lectures at the National University of Rwanda in the Faculty of Law and the National Police Academy on human rights and regulating cybersecurity (October 2022). In her capacity as a member of the committee for research and societal impact of the sub-Saharan Africa policy (2022-2026) of the University of Groningen, she contributed to assessing teaching and learning projects on internationalising the curriculum for quality and inclusive programmes.
Course Curriculum Development & Teaching Innovation
Mando has an extensive track record of designing new courses, developing the curriculum both at undergraduate and graduate levels and teaching in the areas of international law, human rights law and international technology law. She does so by applying innovative learning approaches and tools, including critical legal scholarship, multi-disciplinary approaches, project-based learning and design thinking.
In the Honours Masters programme at the University of Groningen, she designed and taught the Masterclass Dissidence in Leadership "What Would Bert Roling Do?" (2020-2023). The masterclass studied in a multi-disciplinary way the phenomenon of dissidence with a special focus on how scholarship and societal forces bring (or not) change and lead novel ways of thinking. The innovativeness of the module was highlighted in an Interview at the European Society of International Law newsletter.
In the past, she was also involved in teaching at the University College Groningen (2018-2021). I designed and taught the capstone course The Age of Human Rights. The course adopted a multi-disciplinary approach linking students' existing knowledge from other disciplines (e.g. sociology, international relations, political science) to international human rights law. The project-based and the design thinking learning approaches were also employed so as to redefine problems and provide solution-based approaches.
Research Summary
Mando's expertise lies in the areas of human rights law and technology law. She researches the intersection between human rights law and technology, including digital human rights, and human… read more
Selected Publications