Sophie van der Valk

Sophie van der Valk is a FWO funded senior postdoctoral research fellow working on prisoner complaints in Europe. She previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher with the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice on the project Transforming Justice: An All- Island Examination of Justice Responses to Historical Institutional Abuse.

She is a socio- legal researcher who received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin as part of the ERC funded Prisons: the Rule of Law, Accountability and Rights (PRILA) project. Her PhD examined the experiences of those in prison of human rights protecting mechanisms, specifically complaint procedures, inspection and monitoring and the courts. Her findings have been used to inform the new framework of the Office of the Inspector of Prisons
in Ireland and been disseminated through workshops, training days, conference
presentations, reports, blogs and academic publications. Her research has been published both internationally and domestically in journals such as the European Journal of Criminology and the Law and Society Review. She recently published a monograph of her PhD with Routledge entitled 'Overseeing Rights in Prison: The Irish Experience of Human Rights Protection in Prisons'.

She has previously conducted research in the field of counterterrorism, specifically examining issues concerning the prosecution and other measures used against foreign fighters, as well as access to restorative justice for victims in Europe.