Dilek Kurban is Senior Researcher at the Department of International and European Law at the University of Amsterdam, and a research fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL).

Kurban joined the University of Amsterdam in January 2025 with her ERC Starting Grant project titled “Beyond Compliance: Rethinking the Effectiveness of Regional Human Rights Regimes,” a five-year interdisciplinary and comparative study of the effectiveness of European, inter-American and African human rights regimes in non-democratic contexts.

Kurban’s research interests are supranational human rights courts, systemic violations of human rights, rule of law and democracy, and legal mobilization, with a focus on authoritarian regimes. She explored on these issues in her monograph titled Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict (CUP, 2020), which was awarded a Special Mention by the International Society of Public Law (ICON.S) Book Prize Committee. In her earlier research, she focused on state violence, minority rights, media freedom and conflict-induced forced displacement. Kurban’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the European Journal of International Law, Human Rights Law Review, Columbia Human Rights Law Review and University of California Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law.

Kurban holds a PhD from Maastricht University Faculty of Law, a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School and a Master in International Affairs from Columbia University, which was fully funded by scholarships from Columbia University and the government of Turkey. Her PhD dissertation received the 2018 Erasmus Dissertation Prize in the Netherlands.

Prior to joining University of Amsterdam, Kurban was a post-doctoral fellow at iCourts at University of Copenhagen, and a Max Weber post-doctoral fellow at the European University Institute (EUI). She has held research and visiting fellowships at Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL), EUI Law Department, the Hertie School, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, and the European Center for Minority Issues. Her academic and policy research have been funded by the European Commission’s Marie Curie program, Columbia Law School, Mercator Stiftung, EUI and MPIL. She taught as an Adjunct Faculty at the Hertie School and Bogazici University in Istanbul.

Before joining the academia, Kurban had over fifteen years of experience in policy oriented research.

During 2005-2013, she took active part in Turkey’s democratization process at the country’s leading think tank, the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), most recently as the Director of its Democratization Program. In this capacity, she advised the Turkish government, the EU, the UN and the Council of Europe, international NGOs, and regularly appeared in international and domestic media. Her single and joint-authored policy reports on democracy and human rights in Turkey have been widely read and cited by these actors. During 2012-2019, Kurban was the Turkey expert of the Network of Independent Experts on Non-Discrimination, writing annual and ad-hoc reports addressed to the European Commission. Earlier in her career, Kurban worked as an Associate Political Affairs Officer at the United Nations Department of Political Affairs in New York (1999-2001).