Miriam Cohen

Miriam Cohen is an Associate Professor and holds the Canada Research Chair on International Justice and Human Rights at University of Montreal’s Faculty of Law, where she teaches and researches in international, public and human rights law. She is also a researcher at the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP), the Centre international de criminologie comparée (CICC) and the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CÉRIUM).

At the Faculty of Law, she leads a program based on two main axes: international justice and reparation for human rights violations (Axis 1); and the interplay between human rights, new technologies and the empowerment of individuals and communities (Axis 2). She is also the founder of the International Justice and Fundamental Rights Laboratory, where she supervises interdisciplinary research teams developing a specialized technological platform for the analysis of fundamental rights jurisprudence. The project, developed in partnership with the Centre d'expertise numérique en recherche (CEN-R) of the University of Montreal, received a research infrastructure grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) through the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, and a second grant from the Government of Quebec for the creation of the digital research infrastructure, for a total of nearly $400,000 (phase 1).

Before her academic career, Professor Cohen gained extensive experience with international organizations. She worked in the legal department at the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) and previously at the Appeals Chamber and Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). She has also served as a Harvard Law School researcher, as rapporteur for a committee of experts on a draft convention on crimes against humanity, and as a member of a delegation to UN treaty negotiation in Geneva. As legal counsel (international law expert), she acted for the Republic of Panama before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Hamburg). As a member of the Quebec Bar, she has worked in a major law firm in Montreal and offered her expertise in pro bono cases.

Recipient of several awards, fellowships and grants, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Bar Association (Law for the Future Fund) and the Legal Research Foundation, she works with several interdisciplinary and international research teams, and her research has been published in law journals and textbooks in Canada, the United States, Europe, South Korea and Brazil (her home country). She is the author of Realizing Reparative Justice for International Crimes: from Theory to Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-author of the third edition of the Précis de droit international public with Professor Stéphane Beaulac (LexisNexis, 2021).

International law networks regularly seek Professor Cohen as a consultant and trainer. In addition, she is a rapporteur for the Oxford University Press project on international organizations and a member of the boards of the Canadian Council on International Law and the Quebec Society of International Law. Before joining the University of Montreal, she was an Assistant Professor of Law at Lakehead University (Ontario), where she lectured on international law and Canadian domestic public law from 2015 to 2018. Professor Cohen is originally from Brazil and she works in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French, and has basic knowledge of Italian and Dutch.