Elvira Pushkareva has over 20 years of progressively senior and responsible experience providing strategic policy advice, designing, implementing, managing, and evaluating complex policy programmes in the field of international environmental law and human rights while working for the EU, UNEP, WWF, and in academia.
With regard to human rights, Elvira Pushkareva published several books and papers, e.g. International Legal Order and Environmental Human Rights. Since 2014 she has been a consultant with UNEP Headquarters in Nairobi providing strategic advice and legal research opinion on international environmental law and human rights. For example, she advised UNEP on UNEP’s Indigenous Peoples Policy and grievance mechanism, participated in the project on good practices on human rights protection and the environment carried out by UNEP, OHCHR, and the IEE.
While evaluating the Montevideo Programme IV for the Development and Periodic Review of Environmental Law, Elvira Pushkareva, inter alia, analyzed UNEP’s global programmes on post-conflict peacebuilding, natural resources and environment. Along with the victims directly affected by firearms there are all those who suffer from the indirect effects of war, including environmental pollution and degradation, and these indirect consequences often cause more deaths in the long run than the war itself.

During her HIAS fellowship year she will work on a project on international mechanisms to monitor environmental infringements during warfare and development of a strategy for post-crisis environmental assessment in Ukraine.

Her collaboration partner is Anne van Aaken, who holds the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for law and economics, theory of law, international and European law at Universität Hamburg and is director at the Institute for Law and Economics at Universität Hamburg.

Elvira Pushkareva’s HIAS fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.

On the occasion of her exhibition Painting International Law Elvira Pushkareva conversed with Iris Wenderholm on the genesis and goal of this, for a lawyer unusual, expression of human rights and UN laws: