Dr. Monica Arango Olaya joins the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) and the Beyond Compliance: Rethinking the Effectiveness of Regional Human Rights Regimes research project as a post-doctoral researcher. She will lead the Inter-American component of the project. Monica is an international law scholar working at the intersection of constitutional and international human rights law, combining doctrinal with socio-legal and empirical methods. Her research asks how rights are created and sustained through the relationship between law and society — social movements, digital publics, and informal claims-making — critically exploring how rights are conceived, mobilised, and contested within courts, through legal systems, and by transnational social and digital movements. Across these research strands, she applies a sustained focus on gender and legal mobilisation.

Monica's doctoral research examined digital feminism and the Indian #MeToo movement, asking how collective complaints intervene in accountability mechanisms and resettle or disrupt ideas about the law. Her other projects address reproductive rights and international law, strategic litigation in Latin America, and the architecture of compliance mechanisms in constitutional and international law.

Monica's previous work experience includes her role as Deputy Justice at the Colombian Constitutional Court. She was previously Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Center for Reproductive Rights, leading litigation and advocacy before domestic courts, the Inter-American System, and the United Nations. She has also worked as a consultant for UNAIDS and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, among others. She was recently nominated to the UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls.

Monica holds a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, and an LL.B. from Los Andes University. She was a Max Weber Fellow in Law at the European University Institute in 2025–2026. At Oxford, she was a Graduate Research Resident at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and collaborated with the Oxford Human Rights Hub.