Marija Jovanovic

Marija is a human rights lawyer with a research interest in modern slavery and human trafficking, business and human rights, labour rights, migration and refugee law, and regional human rights regimes. She holds DPhil, MPhil, and Magister Juris degrees from the University of Oxford, and a law degree from Serbia.

Marija is currently a Research Fellow in Business and Human Rights at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, and a Co-Investigator on behalf of the Bonavero Institute to the AHRC-funded Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre. She also holds a Senior Lectureship at the Essex Law School. She previously held a Research Fellowship at the Centre for International Law, the National University of Singapore, and a Lectureship in Law in Serbia.

She is the author of State Responsibility for ‘Modern Slavery’ in Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2023) and her recent work has focused on the compatibility of the UK’s immigration legislation with its human rights obligations towards victims of modern slavery, the experiences of modern slavery survivors in the UK prisons, and the issue of child criminal exploitation in the UK. Marija is currently working on the programme of research that focuses on labour exploitation including the ways in which states approach this issue both domestically and through supply chain regulation.  

Marija’s academic work seeks to contribute to both theory and practice of human rights law and is policy-oriented and impact-driven. Her legal consulting roles include collaborations with prominent international and civil society organisations in the human rights field.