Mónica Castillejos-Aragón

Dr. Mónica Castillejos-Aragón is a comparative law and international law lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has a distinguished career as an international human rights lawyer and has worked globally to promote access to justice, the rule of law, and people-centered justice. Her research focuses mainly on courts, politics, and judicial independence in frail democracies and post-conflict societies. She has lectured and participated in various initiatives to strengthen the rule of law, democracy, and human rights at domestic and international levels.

Her international law work also includes managing the rule of law and international justice portfolio for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation at its United Nations liaison office in New York. Through various UN-related projects, she has gained extensive experience advancing the rule of law, global justice, and peacebuilding. Additionally, she has served as a senior legal advisor to independent experts in the United Nations, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. In that role, which lasted five years, she contributed significantly to drafting several UN thematic reports addressing contemporary challenges to judicial independence worldwide. These reports covered issues such as women’s access to the administration of justice, the autonomy of public prosecutors, and the risks lawyers face, among other topics. These reports were annually presented before the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly. Mónica has also worked with and advised human rights organizations to ensure accountability for crimes committed during international and non-international armed conflicts. She authored interventions before international human rights tribunals.

Mónica has published books, articles, and chapters on comparative constitutional law, international human rights law, and international public law. Her scholarship appears in publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Brill | Nijhoff, Elgar Publishing, and human rights journals. Recently, she authored a study titled “The Road to Koblenz Trials: Pathways for International Justice Through the Exercise of Universal Jurisdiction in Germany” (2024). The study focuses on the role of domestic courts in ensuring accountability for international crimes committed in Syria. She has also received prestigious scholarships for her academic and research achievements.

Trained as a social scientist, Mónica holds a Doctor of the Science of Law (J.S.D.) and a Master of Laws (LL.M.) from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. She was selected to participate in the prestigious “Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the Dilemmas of Judicial Power in Comparative Perspective” in 2007 and 2008 at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. She graduated cum laude from the ITAM Department of Law (Licenciada en Derecho) and has been a licensed attorney in Mexico since 2005. Before teaching at Berkeley Law, Mónica clerked for four years at the Supreme Court of Mexico and later served three years as a supervising attorney in the Attorney General’s Office.