Associate Professor and ARC DECRA Fellow Christoph Sperfeldt teaches and pursues socio-legal research in areas of human rights and justice that is empirically grounded and delivers impact of relevance to both scholarly debates and applied endeavours – with a geographical focus on Southeast Asia. Much of his research has centred on how law and its institutions are enacted and experienced by the people who they are designed to serve. Christoph has explored this across a variety of issues, including international human rights law & related protection mechanisms, rule of law, forced migration and development cooperation. In particular, he has made internationally-recognised contributions to two fields of research, transitional justice and statelessness.

Building on his longstanding professional work and research in Cambodia, Christoph has built an extensive research agenda in transitional and international criminal justice. His monograph Practices of Reparations in International Criminal Justice (CUP, 2022) examines the first attempts of international criminal courts to provide reparations to victims of mass atrocities. This research led to requests for advice from a range of institutions involved in reparations work, including the NGO REDRESS, the Kenyan Human Rights Commission, GIZ and Amnesty International.

Christoph’s interest in statelessness and legal identity arose from multi-year field research among the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia. From 2018 to 2021, he was Senior Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School, where he also led the Statelessness Hallmark Research Initiative as Academic Convenor. He remains affiliated with the Centre as a Honorary Fellow. Christoph has advised the UNHCR and was member of a UN International Expert Group on a study on undocumented populations in Sabah, Malaysia. He is also a member of the editorial committee of the Statelessness & Citizenship Review, an Advisory Group member for the Regional Coalition on Statelessness Asia, and a Board member for Nationality for All.

His ARC DECRA research project (2024-2027) seeks to contribute to the study of exclusion and inequality associated with the pursuit of modern legal and digital identification solutions. The interconnected nature of legal and digital identity and governance on the one hand and access to rights, services and protections on the other has made legal identity a pressing issue for development and human rights. By building research and engagement partnerships at country and international levels, especially in Southeast Asia, this project contributes to improving our understanding of how exclusion or inequality in identification frameworks and practices is produced and who it affects. The goal is to identify and consider more inclusive and equitable state and non-state approaches to legal and digital identity that provide improved protections and development opportunities for marginalised populations in different contexts.

Christoph is a Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University, an Associate of the Asia Law Centre at Melbourne Law School, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law at the Royal University of Law and Economics, Cambodia. He was a University Fellow at Charles Darwin University and held visiting positions at the University of Copenhagen, Tilburg University, KU Leuven, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Queen’s University Belfast, the European University Institute, and Nagoya University. Since 2022, Christoph has been Visiting Professor with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, supporting human rights education and training at Cambodian universities. He holds a PhD from the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Australian National University.

Before joining Macquarie Law School, Christoph worked on the ARC-funded project ‘Constitutional Change in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Myanmar’. He also brings to his role at the law school more than a decade of professional experience in working on human rights and the rule of law, predominantly in Southeast Asia. He was Deputy Director at the Asian International Justice Initiative, a joint program of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University and the East-West Center, where he supported human rights and justice sector capacity development in ASEAN. Prior to this, Christoph was Senior Advisor with the German development agency (GIZ) in Cambodia.