VCML-Fellows ab 2025
Greta Spreafico
Short Bio
Greta Spreafico is a PhD candidate in Legal and Political Sciences at the Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi (Rome), where she conducts research in European Union law. Her doctoral project focuses on the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, with particular attention to the principle of solidarity and Regulation (EU) 2024/1351.
Alongside her academic work, she serves as a teaching assistant in EU law at both Università Guglielmo Marconi and LUISS Guido Carli, where she also supports seminars and examination activities. She has gained professional experience as a consultant at Deloitte, working on migration and asylum projects for the Italian Ministry of the Interior within the framework of EU funding programmes (AMIF).
Her research interests lie in EU migration and asylum law, solidarity and responsibility-sharing among Member States, and the governance of migration in the European Union.
Description of the research project
Her doctoral project, provisionally titled “The New Pact on Migration and Asylum: Legal Challenges and Opportunities in the Implementation of the Principle of Solidarity under Regulation (EU) 2024/1351”, examines the evolution and operationalisation of the principle of solidarity in EU migration and asylum law.
The study focuses on the new system of “mandatory but flexible solidarity” introduced by the Regulation on asylum and migration management, analysing the different forms of contribution available to Member States, such as relocation, financial support and alternative measures. It adopts a legal and policy-oriented approach in order to assess how these mechanisms interact with existing allocation criteria, particularly the principle of first entry, and whether they effectively address structural imbalances within the Common European Asylum System.
Bernadette Lumbela
Short Bio
Bernadette Lumbela studied law with a specialization in public international law at the University of Heidelberg and King’s College London. After completing her Second State Examination in 2024, she began her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, where she had previously worked as a research assistant during her studies. She was also involved in the Institute’s project on International Law and Emotions, which explores the role emotions play in legal reasoning across different areas of international law and how this challenges traditional claims of objectivity and neutrality.
Description of the research project
Her PhD project, supervised by Professor Anne Peters, takes a historical-empirical approach to examining the migration infrastructure of bilateral labour agreements (BLAs). Commonly regarded as instruments for regulating legal migration pathways, her research analyzes all agreements concluded by Germany and France since the 1950s with partner countries such as Italy, Japan, Morocco, and Kenya. The project focuses in particular on recruitment procedures and the extent to which migrant workers’ rights, especially collective and social rights, are incorporated. While contemporary agreements tend to be more limited in scope, earlier BLAs facilitated the large-scale recruitment of hundreds of thousands of workers to Germany and France, often under poor living and working conditions. At the VCML, her research will primarily focus on the social inclusion of migrant workers in post-war Germany.
Anna Kompatscher
Short bio
Anna Kompatscher studied law at the Università degli Studi di Trieste (Italy) with an Erasmus stay in Montpellier (France) and a research stay in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany). Then she pursued a Master’s in European Political and Governance studies at the College of Europe in Bruges (Belgium). After working for NGOs in France and Belgium, she began working as a research associate for Prof. Anna Katharina Mangold at the University of Flensburg in September 2021. There, she teaches classes on “EU law” and “EU migration law and politics”. Her areas of interest include migration law and human rights, with a particular focus on social human rights.
Description of the research project
Her PhD project has the preliminary title “The right to healthcare for undocumented migrants in France, Germany and Italy”. It is conducted in a co-tutelle programme between Bucerius Law School in Hamburg and Université Paris 1 Sorbonne, and supervised by Prof. Anna Katharina Mangold, Prof. Ségolène Barbou Des Places, and Prof. Felix Hanschmann. In this comparative study, Anna Kompatscher examines healthcare cost coverage for undocumented migrants in the three countries. The work investigates the hypothesis that, despite the common International and European human rights framework, the extent of healthcare costs covered largely depends on fundamental constitutional norms relating to healthcare and the overall financing systems for healthcare in these countries
Josh Friedman
Short bio
Josh Friedman is a human rights lawyer and development cooperation implementer with more than 25 years’ experience working primarily in the U.S., East Africa, and Central Asia on migration and displacement issues. Earlier in 2025, he was the Practitioner in Residence at the DePaul Migration Collaborative of DePaul University in Chicago. Since 2021, he has run a consultancy firm in Vienna focused on evaluation of development and humanitarian projects globally, with an emphasis on projects working on peace-building and the rights of migrants. Prior to that, Josh practiced law as a gender violence prosecutor and land rights attorney; managed human rights programming for refugees in the Global South; and oversaw regional migration management projects.
Description of the research project
His current research project builds on his research at DePaul on the right to adequate food and the right to adequate housing for recognized refugees in Chicago and Vienna using the lens of international human rights law to analyze national practice. The research emphasizes the relevant legal entitlements and to what extent those benefits actually promote the rights to food and housing for refugees in both cities, as well as what lessons can be learned that have broader application in Europe and North America.
Niklas Cuno
Short bio
Mark Niklas Cuno studied Law with a specialization in Migration Law at the University of Halle. During his studies, he was a student assistant at the Chair of Public Law and the associated Research Unit for Migration Law under Prof. Dr. Winfried Kluth. Since January 2025, he has been working as a PhD researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Since March 2025, he has been a lecturer at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg for a seminar on Migration Law (Praxisprojekt Migrationsrecht).
Description of the research project
His dissertation project, supervised by Prof. Dr. Marie-Claire Foblets, Prof. Dr. Constantin Hruschka, and Dr. Katia Bianchini, examines subsidiary protection for people who have fled conflict situations from a legal anthropological perspective.
Natalie Maurer
Short bio
Natalie Maurer studied law at the Universities of Heidelberg and Gießen. During her studies, she worked as a student assistant in the interdisciplinary DFG research project “Human Rights Discourses in the Migration Society” (MeDiMi) and in the migration law firm of Prof. Dr. Stephan Hocks. Since 2023, she has coordinated the Refugee Law Clinic Giessen, where she has been offering legal advice on a voluntary basis since 2019. Her areas of interest include asylum and residence law, European constitutional law, human rights, in particular socio-economic human rights and feminist jurisprudence. Her first state examination in law was funded by a scholarship from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and awarded by the study prize of the Juristische Studiengesellschaft Gießen e.V. and by the Hessian Ministry of Justice and the Rule of Law.
Description of the research project
Her doctoral project, supervised by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Bast, has the working title “Illegalized employed migrants in Union law”. The work examines legal acts that address the employment of migrants who are illegalized under residence law. It takes a broad approach in order to identify the policy areas affected, the measures taken and the conflicts between them. The aim of the study is to investigate the hypothesis that “conflict situations” exist between these legal acts – on the one hand in the form of norm collisions and on the other through different framings of the phenomenon. According to a further hypothesis of the study, these conflicts can be resolved through an approach that places greater emphasis on fundamental and human rights obligations and is required under EU constitutional law.