David Garciandía Igal

David Garciandía Igal is a DPhil (PhD) candidate in Law at the University of Oxford, where he also teaches EU law at Oriel College and Somerville College. He has also previously taught EU law at SOAS University of London. His doctoral research, funded by the Government of Navarre, examines the diffusion of human rights laws from the EU to China. Under the supervision of Ngoc Son Bui and Iyiola Solanke, his thesis unveils the EU's imprint on various human rights laws, policies and practices in the Asian country, explaining how and why this process of influence is taking place in a legal system as seemingly closed as China's and in an area as sensitive as human rights.

He holds an MPhil in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge (Ramón Areces scholarship) and a Bachelor of Business Administration and a Bachelor of Laws from the Public University of Navarre, where he received the Extraordinary Prize for the top GPA of the Law Faculty. He spent six months at Shijiazhuang Tiedao University (China) as part of his six-year undergraduate joint programme, and his final law dissertation on freedom of religion in China won the 2020 Jaime Brunet University Student Prize for the Promotion of Human Rights.

His main research interests cover EU law, comparative law, international law and international relations, with a special focus on human rights. He has several publications on these topics, including a book with Brazilian Judge Aloisio C. dos Santos Jr. on the corporate duty of reasonable accommodation of religious beliefs in the workplace. He has given numerous talks and presented at different conferences. 

He is a DPhil associate at the Oxford China Centre, a founder and former president of the Oxford Spanish Society and a former convenor of the Oxford EU Law Discussion Group. Additionally, he has been the research assistant to the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, and has worked for the Permanent Mission of Spain to the United Nations in Vienna and for different private companies (Siemens Gamesa) and law firms (Garrigues).