Afrooz Maghzi Visiting Fellow
Afrooz Maghzi is an Iranian lawyer, socio-legal researcher, and human rights activist. Her focus is on multiculturalism and minority rights in Europe, gender inequality in Islamic criminal and family law, and social movements. She is currently affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPI) in Halle (Saale), Germany. Moreover, she collaborates with the UN and EU human rights agencies as an external legal consultant. Previously, Maghzi worked as a lawyer, researcher, and activist in Iran, Ireland, and Malaysia, cooperating with several civil society and international NGOs. She primarily worked to help victims and suspects in gender-related, political and family cases, often pro bono. She represented clients before the highest courts in Iran and cooperated with several human rights campaigns, notably the “One Million Signatures Campaign” to repeal discriminatory laws against women.
She holds a PhD in law from the University of Halle-Wittenberg and the MPI (Germany), with a focus on Religious and Customary-Based Non-State Justice. Additionally, she has an LLM from University College Dublin (Ireland), another LLM from Mazandaran University (Iran), and an LLB from Tehran University (Iran).
During her Fellowship, she will work on her current research project on cause lawyering in Iran.