Daniela Ikawa teaches Introduction to Human Rights and Equality, Identity and Rights in the Human Rights Studies M.A. Program. She is currently a Senior legal Advisor at FILE Foundation. She was formerly a Senior Strategic Litigation Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative.
A Brazilian lawyer, she obtained her LLM from Columbia University Law School and her doctorate from the University of São Paulo (USP). At Columbia, she was nominated Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar for her academic accomplishments in May 1999. Her doctoral thesis at USP was approved with distinction in 2006, published in 2008 by Lumen Iuris, and cited by the Brazilian Supreme Court in its 2012 decision that declared the constitutionality of affirmative action programs in Brazil.
Ikawa worked at Conectas Human Rights (Sao Paulo), PILnet (New York), and the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (New York), and taught at the Central European University (Budapest) and PUC (Sao Paulo). She was the managing co-editor of Sur-International Journal on Human Rights and has published approximately forty books and articles on human rights in the United States and Brazil. Her current research focuses on the connection between particularly situated individuals and a contextualized theory of rights.
Recent Publications
Contextualized Rights as Effective Rights to All: The Case of Affirmative Action in Brazil, Vol 12: Who Wants To Share? Attitudes Towards Horizontal Redistribution Across the Globe (2024).
Hungary’s Anti-NGO Tax Law Violates Free Speech and Freedom of Association, Open Society Justice Initiative (2018).
Rights for real people, networks and a view from everywhere, Transnational Advocacy Networks: Reflecting on 15 years of Evolving Theory and Practice (2018).
Building Pluralism through Affirmative Action. The case of Brazil. Canada: Global Centre for Pluralism (2017).
Asking whose lives matter in the battle for social, cultural, and economic rights, Open Democracy (19 November 2016).
