Nina Petzel is a PhD researcher and lecturer at the department of Criminal Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, as well as a research fellow at the Center for International Criminal Justice (CICJ) and the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research (NNHRR). She researches and teaches on themes related to international criminal law, criminology, conflict studies and transitional justice.
Currently, she conducts her PhD research on the legal challenges related to domestic prosecutions of the crime of aggression under universal jurisdiction. Combining legal doctrinal analysis and empirical research, she additonally explores the status of universal jurisdiction prosecutions of the crime of aggression under customary international law in the context of a project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Nina Petzel holds a LL.B degree in European Law (2019) from Maastricht University and a MSc degree in International Crimes, Conflict and Criminology (2023, cum laude) from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her master’s thesis on role of intersecting identities for the distribution of humanitarian aid to displaced communities received the International Crimes, Conflict and Criminology Thesis Prize 2023, and was nominated for the J.C. Baak Prize and the Master Thesis Award by the Dutch Association for Criminology (NVC).