Participant details
Maaike de Langen
Maaike de Langen is Program Lead on Justice for All, a program of the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies at NYU’s Centre for International Cooperation. The program builds on the Justice for All report, published by the Task Force on Justice, which sets out an agenda for action for the achievement of SDG16’s promise of access to justice for all.
Maaike started her career with the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance, and Development (Leiden University). She then worked for UNDP in N’Djamena, Chad and at HQ in New York, working on governance, human rights, access to justice and legal empowerment of the poor. She was first advisor to the National ombudsman of the Netherlands for eight years, creating and leading the Department for Strategy and Policy. In 2014, she returned to Mali for a year, to design the Dutch bilateral program on Security and Rule of Law. She joined NYU-CIC early in 2018.
Swati Mehta
Swati Mehta is a Senior Program Officer, Justice for All, which is part of the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies project at New York University's Center on International Cooperation. Starting her career by providing legal aid for women, she soon moved on to systemic reform. More recently, her work has focused on legal empowerment as well as decentralization and democratization of justice, with people at the center of justice programming.
Working with several CSOs, UNDP and other justice programs in South and Southeast Asia, Swati has designed, managed and led several justice programs over the last 20 years. She has written, edited and reviewed several papers on legal empowerment, policing, legal aid and traditional, customary and informal justice systems.
A Chevening Scholar, Swati holds an LLM degree in International Criminal Law, Criminology and Criminal Justice from King’s College London. She loves to engage with young people, artists and musicians on justice.
Professor Nigel J. Balmer
As the inaugural VLF Research Director, Nigel led the development of the Research function at VLF including the Public Understanding of Law Survey (PULS).
He has been conducting empirical research for over twenty years and is an expert in the application of social science and modern quantitative methods to explore how the public understand and interact with the law.
Nigel’s research includes work on the role of law in everyday life; attitudes to justice; public experience of and response to legal issues; the interaction between legal and health problems; and design of legal services and legal aid. He is best known for his work on legal need surveys around the world, including recent guidance supporting global access to justice initiatives under the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16. Nigel is also Honorary Professor of Law and Social Statistics at University College London.
