Department of Criminology
The Migration Law Research Centre
Professor ILS PAS
email: witold.klaus@gmail.com
PhD in law, professor at the Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (Head of the Department of Criminology), researcher in the Centre of Migration Research at Warsaw University; a lawyer and criminologist; President of the Board of the Association for Legal Intervention.
His main areas of academic interest cover: criminology, victimology, criminal policy, human rights, refugee and immigrant rights, migration policy, juvenile and restorative justice.
Research grants:
- Project implemented for national security and defence under competition No. 4/2013: SIC-Modular Multi-Purpose System for Identification of Foreigners with a Risk Analysis Module for Victims of Human Trafficking Crime (2013-2016)
- Ensuring public safety and order as a justification for the criminalisation of migration – project funded by the Polish National Science Centre (2018-2023)
- Victimisation of homeless people in Poland – project funded by the Polish National Science Centre (2018-2019)
- Polish migrants deported from the UK; project funded by the British Academy (2018)
- Experiences of Poles deported from the United Kingdom in their contact with the justice system project funded by the Polish National Science Centre (2018-2024)
- Finding Agreement in Return (FAIR) – European Commission HorizonEurope grant (2023-2025)
Scholarships:
- 2018 – British Academy Visiting Fellowship, Edge Hill University, UK;
- 2015 – Scholarship of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg, Germany;
- 2012 – Alumnae of The US Department of States International Visitor Leadership Program (Human Trafficking and Forced Labour).
Awards:
- 2009 second prize for the best legal Ph.D. thesis awarded by one of the leading Polish legal journal called “State and Law” [“Państwo i Prawo”]
- 2009 Social Nobel Prize by Ashoka Foundation – Innovators for the Public
- honourable mention in the competition for the Leon Petrażycki Science Prize for monographs Criminal Careers. Life and Crime Trajectories of Former Juvenile Offenders Adulthood (Routledge, London 2022), edited by Witold Klaus, Irena Rzeplińska and Dagmara Woźniakowska-Fajst
