Panepinto is a Law for Palestine’s Board of Trustees member since July 2020. She is a Lecturer within the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast. Prior to this, she was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Human Rights in Practice at Warwick Law School, where she was also part of the editorial team of Lacuna, the Centre’s human rights magazine (http://www.lacuna.org.uk). She is also the lead researcher of the “Palestinian Bedouin at Risk of Forced Displacement” research project (Belfast).
Panepinto’s research on transitional justice and the right to the truth spans across human rights and international law, with a strong interdisciplinary interest in comparative law, socio-legal studies and Islamic legal systems. She holds a PhD from Durham University Law School, defending a thesis on ‘Relocating Transitional Justice from International Law to Muslim-majority Legal Systems: Concepts, Approaches and Ways Forward’. Her teaching experience includes human rights, public international law and international security.
Panepinto was previously based in Jerusalem as a 2014 UN-DESA Fellow in Human Rights (assigned to the Italian Development Cooperation) working on a range of international law and justice sector issues in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Hebron. Through her practitioner work she has developed technical expertise on human rights and IHL in Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian context, which forms the basis for her new research projects. Current and recent projects have attracted funding from ESRC-IAA, AHRC-DFID and the Society of Legal Scholars.