Lavinia Parsi is a PhD candidate in criminal law, in cotutelle between the Università degli Studi di Milano and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Alongside her academic path, she has collaborated with legal organisations dedicated to strategic litigation, including Adalah, the European Center for Human Rights, Lawyers for Justice in Libya and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and has worked as judicial clerk at the Tribunal of Milano.

Lavinia’s field of research is international criminal law, her current object of research being at the intersection between international crimes of displacement and policies of rejection of migrants and refugees.

Project description: 

Lavinia’s doctoral project analyses the relevance under international criminal law of acts of forced displacement perpetrated in furtherance of a State-policy, and their possible relevance vis-à-vis anti-migration policies. While the status of deportation and forcible transfer as crimes under international law is rather well-established, most constitutive elements thereof had to be defined through jurisprudential interpretation over the decades. In the past, international criminal tribunals have thus progressively shaped the distinctive features of each crime, some of which remain however highly debated in the academic domain and in jurisprudence. These elements pose further challenges when applied outside of their traditional context, as in the case of conducts of push-backs, pull-backs, interceptions and repatriations of migrants. In order to define the edges of the subject, the research will thus analyse the practices of deportation of migrants in Italy and Lebanon and verify whether they may be subsumed under provisions of international criminal law.