Dr Marina Lostal

Biography

Marina Lostal is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex, with over twelve years of experience in research, teaching, and international legal practice. She holds a PhD and an LL.M. from the European University Institute (Florence) and an LL.M. from the University of Cambridge. Her career spans academic appointments in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, China, Australia, and Argentina. Her research focuses on the protection of cultural property in armed conflict, international criminal law, reparations, rights of nature and animal protection. She has extensive experience in practice, including work at the International Criminal Court, where she was appointed expert in the reparations phase of Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi and later served as a Reparations Expert at the ICC Trust Fund for Victims. She has consulted for UNESCO, Geneva Call, and the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and her research has been cited and used by international and hybrid courts, including the ICC and the JEP. More recently, she actively contributed to the ICC Office of the Prosecutor’s Draft Policy on environmental crimes, where she advocated for the legal recognition of natural entities as potential victims of international crimes. She is the Principal Investigator of an APEX Award (2025–2027) for a pioneering project exploring how reparations can be designed for rivers as legal and natural entities. She has also been awarded an AHRC grant as Co-Investigator on a project examining the establishment of an Indigenous University in Colombia from a human rights perspective, among other grants. She is the author of the monograph International Cultural Heritage Law in Armed Conflict (Cambridge University Press) and has published in leading journals including the Journal of International Criminal Justice and the International Journal of Cultural Property, as well as in edited volumes with Oxford, Cambridge, and Edward Elgar. She is a member of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law and the International Law Association Committee on Safeguarding Cultural Heritage in Armed Conflict.

Qualifications

• PhD European University Institute, (2013)

• LLM in Comparative, European and International Law European University Institute, (2010)

• Master of Law University of Cambridge, (2009)

• Licenciatura en Derecho Universidad de Zaragoza, (2008)

• Master in Animal Law and Society Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, (2020)

Appointments

University of Essex

• Senior Lecturer, Essex Law School, University of Essex (24/7/2020 - present)