Anna Karolina Chimiak

Anna Karolina Chimiak is a doctoral researcher at the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University. She is part of the ERC-funded GROUNDOC project, which examines how grassroots actors in aparadigmatic transitional justice contexts develop innovative practices of documentation, truth-seeking, and memory preservation. The project explores how these initiatives resist structures of violence and expand the possibilities of justice beyond institutional frameworks.

Her research focuses on Mexico, where victims of serious human rights violations, particularly families of the disappeared, have become central justice actors, placing documentation at the core of their strategies in a context marked by state-criminal collusion and the lack of effective institutional responses. She approaches Mexico as an aparadigmatic transitional justice setting. By analysing these practices, she examines how family-led documentation produces and sustains forms of truth and justice in a setting that does not align with dominant transitional justice mechanisms, and how these practices interact with, challenge, and expand such frameworks from the ground up.

Anna Karolina holds an Integrated Master’s Degree in Law and an Integrated Master’s Degree in Political Science from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, including an Erasmus exchange at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. She also completed advanced diplomas in Human Rights and Transitional Justice and in the Accusatory Criminal Justice System (Ibero-American University, Mexico), as well as in Public Policy Advocacy.

She has over thirteen years of professional experience in human rights across Mexico, the Republic of Moldova, Spain, and Poland, with expertise on enforced disappearances, torture, children’s rights, and the protection of human rights defenders. Since 2016, she has worked at the Centro de Justicia para la Paz y el Desarrollo (CEPAD) in Jalisco, Mexico, where she became Co-Director in 2020. In this role, she provided legal, political, and psychosocial accompaniment to families of the disappeared and victims of torture, coordinated national and international advocacy strategies, delivered conferences and workshops, offered technical assistance, and contributed to the strengthening of institutions, policies, and laws on disappearances, human rights defenders and victims’ rights. She also led initiatives on children’s rights, developing research and advocacy tools to protect children affected by grave human rights violations. She is the author and co-author of several reports, publications and columns on enforced disappearances, accountability, forensic crises, victims’ rights, and human rights institutions.