Elvira Loibl (E.C.)

Criminology 

Human Rights 

Transitional Justice

Transformative Justice 

Elvira Loibl is an Endowed Professor of Recognition, Dialogue and Repair after Intercountry Adoption at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University. She is a legal scholar and criminologist and has devoted most of her academic career to research on intercountry adoption. Her work combines criminological and legal perspectives with insights from human rights and, more recently, transitional and transformative justice.

In 2019, she defended her PhD dissertation at Maastricht University, The Transnational Illegal Adoption Market: A Criminological Study of the German and Dutch Intercountry Adoption Systems (cum laude). In this study, she identified structural weaknesses in the German and Dutch adoption systems and examined how these weaknesses enable and facilitate illegal practices in intercountry adoption. The dissertation received an honourable mention from the selection committee of the 2021 Modderman Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of criminal law and was nominated for the 2022 Willem Nagel Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in criminology.

Since completing her PhD, the focus of her research has gradually shifted from the causes and structural conditions of illegal intercountry adoption to its aftermath and the related questions of responsibility and repair. In 2024, she co-edited the book Facing the Past: Policies and Practices for Responses to Illegal Intercountry Adoptions with David Smolin. The volume brings together contributions from international scholars from different disciplines as well as adoptees themselves and explores how societies and institutions can respond to past injustices in the field of intercountry adoption. Building on this collaboration, she founded Facing the Past (www.facing-the-past.org), an international network of scholars researching illegal intercountry adoption and its aftermath.

Her academic work has contributed to national and international debates on illegal intercountry adoption and has been cited in several inquiries and commissioned studies in this field, including the report of the Joustra Committee on intercountry adoption in the past (2021). She also regularly contributes her expertise to public debate in the Netherlands and internationally, including through NRC Handelsblad, Trouw, Zembla, NDR, Deutschlandfunk, Deutsche Welle, and the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK. In 2024, she received the Edmond Hustinx Prize for her research on illegal intercountry adoption.

Her current research examines how states and institutions deal with the legacy of intercountry adoption and what meaningful recognition and repair require from the perspective of those directly affected. With a research grant from the NWO Open Competition SSH-XS, she studies the multivoicedness of intercountry adoptees’ experiences and perspectives and what this means for processes of recognition and repair. Her research also focuses on questions of identity and access to information, as well as the relationships and power dynamics that shape processes of recognition, dialogue and repair between adoptees and state institutions. These themes are central to her work within the Special Chair of Recognition, Dialogue and Repair after Intercountry Adoption.