dr. M.M.E. (Marlies) Hesselman

Expertise

Dr. Marlies Hesselman is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Transboundary Legal Studies of the Faculty of Law. She teaches in the areas of public international law, human rights, international environmental /climate law, and environmental health.  She holds an LLB from Leiden University; LLM European Law, spec. human rights and LLM in International Law, spec. human rights (cum laude, top 2%) from Groningen University, and a PhD in International Law on human rights and modern energy services access. She has held a fully-funded Visiting Scholarship at the London School of Economics, Center for Human Rights.

Hesselman is currently Chair of the Groningen Center for Health Law and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health. She is also academic co-coordinator of the Joint Summer School on Global Governance of Health Vulnerabilities in Africa in Tanzania and recently co-founded the new Working Group on Human Rights and the Climate Crisis at the Netherlands Network on Human Rights Research. She is part of the Global Peer Network on Climate Litigation of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law of Columbia University.

Hesselman’s research addresses the intersections of socio-economic human rights law, energy, climate change and environmental health, with a strong focus on international human rights law practice and rights-based legal moblization by civil society. Presently, her research concentrates on the 'transnational' legal development of the ‘right to energy’ as a newly emerging right in the 21st century, including as related to just transitions. At the Groningen Center for Health Law she leads and supervises research on the health-related dimensions of climate change, with a specific interest in climate litigation and the interaction between international climate law and human rights law, through the lens of 'global health law'. In the past, Hesselman has written extensively on the human rights dimensions of disaster settings. As a founding co-editor of the Yearbook of International Disaster Law (Brill Nijhoff) between 2017-2022, she has contributed to the establishment of a new field of study called 'international disaster law'.

Hesselman has published widely in her areas of interest, in leading publications, including The Lancet (IF 168,9), the BMJ (IF 107.2), Energy Research and Social Sciences (IF 11,6), Sustainable Development (IF 12.5) and iScience (Cell), Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, Nederlands Juristenblad (NJB), Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Energierecht, or with OUP, CUP, Routledge, Edward Elgar, Brill, TMC Asser. She was a lead-editor of the edited volume 'Socio-Economic Human Rights in Essential Public Services Provision' (Routledge, 2017) and co-authored the first evidence-based analysis of the new phenomenon of 'Just Transition Litigation' with fellow-members of Columbia Law School's Global Peer Network on Climate Litigation.

Between 2018-2022, Hesselman co-led WG3 of the EU COST Action ENGAGER: European Energy Poverty: Knowledge Innovation and Agenda Co-Creation funded by the EU Cooperation on Science and Technology Scheme. ENGAGER is an international multidisciplinary network of 200+ acadmics and practioners working on energy poverty in Europe. As part of ENGAGER, she led and co-produced the novel COVID-19 Global Energy Map: a major visual database of 380+ emergency energy poverty policies adopted in 120+ countries around the world during the pandemic. The map's method and initial findings were published in Energy Research & Social Sciences. She also co-authored the influential TNO White Paper on Energy Poverty and the Energy Transition in the Netherlands (2021) which has been the basis for the development of novel national indicators for energy poverty measurement in the Netherlands. In 2022, she wrote a seminal entry on the 'Right to Energy' for the Edward Elgar Encyclopedia on Human Rights.

More information here about past and ongoing research projects.

See here for full list of 75+ publications // Google Scholar page.

Engaging with practice:

Finally, Hesselman enjoys engaging with practice and greatly values the societal impact of her academic research. She held positions within government and NGO sectors, incl. traineeships at the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in China. and EU Delegation in China, Beijing, (Development Cooperation sections), and as project manager at the Beijing office of international NGO 'International Bridges to Justice'. In the Netherlands, she temporarily worked as legal advisor at the International Law Division (DJZ) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs', and advised refugees and asylumseekers at Vluchtelingenwerk Nederland (Dutch Refugee Council). She has also been active for the Dutch Section of the International Commission of Jurists, NJCM, coordinating their group on International Human Rights Protection from 2011-2013, and acting as national coordinator of coalition shadow reports for UN Human Rights procedures and as NGO-coalition representative at the UN Human Rights Council (2012) and UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (in 2009-2010 and 2016-2017). She also trained international human rights defenders on UN human rights monitoring.

Hesselman's publications have informed and been cited by several UN human rights monitoring bodies: e.g. drafts of CEDAW's General Comment 37 on Disaster Risk Reduction in a Changing Climate (2018); annual report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food on "Right to Food and Natural Disasters" (2018); studies of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights related to 'Human Rights and the Environment' (2011) 'Human Rights in Post-Disaster Settings' (2014) and 'The Right to Health and Climate Change' (2015-2016).