Vanessa Topp

Biography

Vanessa Topp is a SeNSS DTP funded Postgraduate Research Student at Essex Law School and the Human Rights Centre conducting a a socio-legal research project on the criminalisation of humanitarian assistance provided to people on the move in the European Union - supervised by Professor Geoff Gilbert, Dr Matthew Gillett and Dr Esin Küçük. She also works as a Research Officer on the project "Speech Crimes in International Criminal Law" which seeks to develop a follow-up to the Hartford Guidelines on Speech Crimes in International Criminal Law (2017), by exploring how recent developments, particularly regarding social media, have impacted on the form and delivery of speech crimes and how international law and practice must adapt to speech crimes in the new digital era. Previously, she worked as a Research Officer on the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre funded project “Survivors of Modern Slavery in Prisons: The Blind Spot of the UK Anti-Slavery Regime”. Vanessa is interested in the intersection of different legal regimes, particularly international human rights law, international humanitarian law, refugee law, and international criminal law. Before joining Essex Law School, she worked for several years as a researcher in the humanitarian aid sector and was based in Somalia, Kenya, and the occupied Palestinian territory. She also worked with grassroots non-governmental organisations promoting the rights of migrants in France, Greece, and Jordan. At the University of Essex, Vanessa is currently involved with the Digital Verification Unit, in partnership with Amnesty International. During her LLM she worked on a Human Rights Clinic Project on "Accountability and Oversight of UK Special Forces" in collaboration with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Conflict. She was also a member of the Human Rights Centre's Arbitrary Detention Redress Unit, in collaboration with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. She

Qualifications

• BA International Relations University of Georgia,

• MA Human Rights and Humanitarian Action (Global Health) Sciences Po,

• LLM International Human Rights Law University of Essex,