It’s our great pleasure today to introduce Isabel Mota Borges as an IntLawGrrls contributor. Isabel is a qualified registered lawyer holding a Licenciatura (five-year law degree) from the University of Coimbra, Faculty of law, Portugal and LL.M in International Law with International Relations from the University of Kent, UK. She is currently a Ph.D. Research Fellow at the University of Oslo, Faculty of Law, the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights. Her research seeks to devise adequate human rights protection standards for those displaced or potentially displaced by environmental factors. In 2014, she was a visiting researcher at Georgetown University Law in Washington D.C.

Prior to coming to Oslo, Isabel spent ten years of her professional experience working at the European Union level in Brussels. Here she worked for the European Commission performing evaluation of tenders, impact assessments, where she followed-up the principles, priorities, intermediate objectives and conditions of the accession partnership with Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. She also worked for several grassroots international NGOs being responsible for development of policy initiatives, policy dialogue, and stakeholder capacity building, on EU and UN social and human rights issues such as fundamental rights, gender equality, corporate social responsibility, migration, health, poverty, social inclusion and violence against women, as well as coordinating and managing several EU research funded projects. She has a wide range of experience in technical assistance projects (rule of law, human rights, civil society capacity building, promotion of democracy, conflict prevention) and advising developing and transitional economies under several European Union financial instruments. Currently, she still acts as a Legal Adviser for the European Commission on internal market issues.​

Isabel’s first post will discuss the future of Schengen. Heartfelt welcome!