Rate My Professor Christoph Sperfeldt

Associate Professor and ARC DECRA Fellow Christoph Sperfeldt teaches and pursues socio-legal research in areas of human rights and justice at Macquarie Law School, Macquarie University. His research is empirically grounded and delivers impact relevant to scholarly debates and applied endeavours, with a geographical focus on Southeast Asia. Sperfeldt holds a PhD in Law, Regulation and Governance from the Australian National University, awarded on 14 December 2018. Before joining Macquarie Law School, he worked on the ARC-funded project ‘Constitutional Change in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Myanmar’. He brings more than a decade of professional experience in human rights and rule of law, predominantly in Southeast Asia, including as Deputy Director at the Asian International Justice Initiative—a joint program of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University and the East-West Center—where he supported human rights and justice sector capacity development in ASEAN. Previously, he was Senior Advisor with the German development agency GIZ in Cambodia. Sperfeldt served as Senior Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School from 2018 to 2021, leading the Statelessness Hallmark Research Initiative, and remains an Honorary Fellow there. He is a Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law at the Royal University of Law and Economics in Cambodia, Associate of the Asia Law Centre at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute supporting human rights education in Cambodian universities since 2022. He has held visiting positions at the University of Copenhagen, Tilburg University, KU Leuven, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Queen’s University Belfast, the European University Institute, and Nagoya University.

Sperfeldt has made internationally recognised contributions to transitional justice and statelessness. His monograph Practices of Reparations in International Criminal Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the first attempts of international criminal courts to provide reparations to victims of mass atrocities, drawing on interdisciplinary techniques and original ethnographic fieldwork. This work has informed advice to institutions including REDRESS, the Kenyan Human Rights Commission, GIZ, and Amnesty International. Building on field research among the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia, he co-edited Statelessness in Asia with Michelle Foster and Jaclyn Neo (Cambridge University Press, 2024). His ARC DECRA project (2024-2027) addresses exclusion and inequality in legal and digital identification frameworks in Southeast Asia, fostering partnerships for more inclusive approaches. Sperfeldt has advised UNHCR, participated in a UN International Expert Group on undocumented populations in Sabah, Malaysia, serves on the editorial committee of Statelessness & Citizenship Review, is an Advisory Group member for the Regional Coalition on Statelessness Asia, and a Board member for Nationality for All.