Mattia Pinto
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

PhD (LSE), Single-Cycle Master's Degree in Law (Bologna, Italy), LLM (KCL), PGCertHE (LSE)

Lecturer and co-programme leader, LLM in International Human Rights Law and Practice

I am a lecturer at York Law School and the Centre for Applied Human Rights, where I co-convene the LLM in International Human Rights Law and Practice. I joined York in 2022, after teaching at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I also interned at the European Court of Human Rights (Registry) and the International Criminal Court (Office of Public Counsel for the Defence), and worked as a research assistant at King’s College London.

I hold a PhD in law from the LSE, a Single-Cycle Master’s Degree in Law (MJur) from the University of Bologna, Italy, an LLM in Transnational Law from King’s College London and a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCertHE) from the LSE. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

My research interests span across human rights, criminology and criminal law (including international criminal law), socio-legal studies (especially discourse analysis and socio-legal theory) and international political sociology.

Research

Overview

• Human rights (torture, human trafficking, migration issues)
• Criminal law and criminology (sociology of punishment)
• International criminal law
• International law and transnational law
• Socio-legal studies (discourse analysis and socio-legal theory)
• International political sociology

I have three ongoing strands of research:

1. Human Rights as Sources of Penality

My primary area of research focuses on the relationship between human rights and penality. I am interested in the role that human rights play in both limiting as a ‘shield’ and triggering as a ‘sword’ the state’s penal powers. 
I am working on a book manuscript for Oxford University Press (Clarendon Studies in Criminology), based on my PhD thesis, which critiques the entanglements between human rights and penality, where enforcement of human rights increasingly relies on punitive frameworks and institutions. The book, entitled Human Rights as Sources of Penality, exposes the assumptions and reasons that underpin this trend in two critical areas of human rights violations: torture and human trafficking. It combines an empirical discourse analysis of 480 texts across different sources and a theoretical enquiry informed by the sociology of punishment and the realist political tradition.

2. Rethinking Accountability Beyond the Penal Frame

My research also explores possible alternatives for dealing with violence and domination without turning to penal solutions. This strand of research is normative and collaborative: I aim to work with non-academic partners and grassroots organisations and to generate cross-disciplinary insights and recommendations for policy and practice in this area. I examine methods of accountability for torture that extend beyond punitive approaches, as well as how human rights law and activism can draw lessons from penal abolitionism and traditional grassroots justice mechanisms.

3. Law as/and Discourse

In addition to the above research, I am also interested in methodological issues. I am working on a project with Dr Audrey Alejandro (LSE Methodology) on developing a methodological toolkit for ‘law as/and discourse’. This project aims to guide researchers, educators and students in exploring law and discourse as a vital area of socio-legal enquiry.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• International Criminal Justice

Postgraduate

• International Criminal Justice
• Human Rights Placement
• Applying International Human Rights Law

Publications

Selected publications

Peer Reviewed Journal

‘In Pursuit for Greater Accountability for Torture: The Case of Giulio Regeni After Judgment No. 192/2023 of the Italian Constitutional Court’ (with Piergiuseppe Parisi) (2024) Italian Yearbook of International Law (In press)

‘Border Penality as Antagonistic Politics’ (2024) Theoretical Criminology (E-pub ahead of print)

‘Coercive Human Rights and the Forgotten History of the Council of Europe's Report on Decriminalisation’ (2023) 86(5) Modern Law Review 1108

‘Discursive alignment of trafficking, rights and crime control’ (2022) International Journal of Law in Context 1-21

‘Of Sex and War: Carceral Feminism and Its Anti-Carceral Critique’ (2021) 8(2) London Review of International Law 351

‘Historical Trends of Human Rights Gone Criminal’ (2020) 42(4) Human Rights Quarterly 729 (open access version published in the LSE Law Working Papers)

‘Awakening the Leviathan through Human Rights Law: How Human Rights Bodies Trigger the Application of Criminal Law’ (2018) 34(2) Utrecht Journal of International and European Law 161

‘The Denationalisation of Foreign Fighters: How European States Expel Unwanted Citizens’ (2018) 9(1) King’s Student Law Review 67

Book Chapters

‘Rights-driven Global Penality’ in Mazzacuva, Odriozola Gurrutxaga, Recchia and Santangelo (eds), Criminal Justice in the Prism of Human Rights (Maklu Publishers 2023)

‘Human Rights as Penal Drivers Across the World’ in Farmer, Hörnle, Ormerod and Ó Floinn (eds), The Transformation of Criminal Jurisdiction: Extraterritoriality and Enforcement (Hart Publishing, forthcoming).

‘Sowing a “Culture of Conviction”: What Shall Domestic Criminal Justice Systems Reap from Coercive Human Rights?’ in Lavrysen & Mavronicola (eds), Coercive Human Rights: Positive Duties to Mobilise the Criminal Law under the ECHR (Hart Publishing 2020) (open access version published in the LSE Law Working Papers)

External activities

Overview

• Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (AFHEA)
• Co-convenor of the Yorkshire Criminal Law Forum
• Member of the Law and Society Association (LSA), Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), Associazione Antigone, DoingIPS, Accademia Diritto eMigrazioni (ADiM)
• Regular reviewer for academic journals in the areas of human rights law, (international) criminal law, international law and international relations