Board of Advisors

​Elif Güney Menderes received her undergraduate degree from Boğaziçi University, Department of Political Science and International Relations. She spent the last year of her undergraduate degree at Universitad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, as part of the Erasmus+ program. She worked on renewable energy cooperation in BRICS countries for her Master’s degree. Before joining the Friedrich Naumann team, she was on the founding team of Co-Opinion, a youth NGO that adresses the problems of young people in the Middle East and North Africa. She worked as an intern and researcher in different institutions including the Istanbul Policy Center and the United Nations Development Program. She has been working as Program Manager at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation since 2017. She speaks English and Spanish.

Yiğit Göktuğ Torun is a Political Science and International Relations - Philosophy double major bachelor student at Bogazici University. In his third year, he spent his exchange semester at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea. In the future, he aims to focus on the Middle East, migration, and integration topics. During his studies, he joined a project for refugee children in Cairo, Egypt, and did his Erasmus+ internship at Duisburg-Essen University on Turkish-originated migration waves. In 2022, he started working as a project assistant for the Human Rights Academy.

Olgun Akbulut is a faculty member in the fields of Human Rights and Constitutional Law. His research interests are in human rights, minority rights and comparative constitutional law. He served as a post-doc visiting researcher at Harvard Law School and as a doctoral researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Lund/Sweeden). Prof. Dr. Akbulut’s research papers, both in the fields of human rights and consitutional law have been published in various academic journals. He is currently the Head of the Consitutional Law Department of the Faculty of Law at Kadir Has University.

Boran Eroğul graduated from Bilgi University, Department of European Union Relations. He was part of a team working with Eskişehir Municipality and realising social projects to raise awareness. He did his Erasmus in Lithuania and participated in media projects at his university to prevent polarisation and increase international interaction. He got acquainted with the Human Rights Academy in the last year of his undergraduate education and took part in democratic rights and basic human rights courses. He completed his internship at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in December 2023. In 2024, he started working as a Project Assistant at the Human Rights Academy.

Önder Bakırcıoğlu, is a professor of law in the field of International Public Law and Human Rights Law; especially working on the use of force discourse in international and domestic settings. Dr. Bakırcıoğlu received his undergraduate degree from Istanbul University Faculty of Law, his master’s degree from the University of Essex, and his doctorate from the National University of Ireland. He worked as a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast between 2008-2014. He has been working as an Associate Professor at Leicester Law School since 2014.

Rick Lawson, is a law professor and current Chair in European Human Rights Law at Leiden University. Previously, from 2011-2016, he was the Dean of Leiden Law School. In his research, he focuses on human rights and the rule of law, spesifically on how European organizations - including the OSCE - contribute to global and regional human rights. Lawson advises the Council of Europe, notably the Pariamentary Assembly, and the European Union on issues surrounding human rights. He also previously worked as a lawyer for the European Commission of Human Rights in Strasbourg and was a founding member of the EU Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights.

Nevşin Mengü, received her undergraduate degree in Political Science from Bilkent University and her master’s degreef from Universite de Galatasaray with a thesis titled “Social views on Turkey”. After working on numerous media networks, she began to present “Nevşin Mengü asks” on DW Turkey on YouTube. She also presents the news on a YouTube channel which she founded.

He was born in 1984 in Diyarbakır. He graduated from Istanbul University Faculty of Law in 2006 then he got his master's degree from Marmara University Faculty of Law. 

He is the co-director of Media and Law Studies Association and he has been serving as the lawyer of many high profile ECHR cases. He was awarded Thomas Dehler award in 2019.

Evrim Hikmet Öğüt completed her PhD in Ethnomusicology at Istanbul Technical University Centre for Advanced Studies in Music with a issertation titled “Music in Transit: Musical Practices of the Chaldean-Iraqi Migrants in Istanbul”. She completed her undergraduate studies and master’s program in the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Department of Musicology. Her master’s thesis is n the relation between contemporary music and contemporary poetry. She currently works as an associate professor and the head of Ethnomusicology and Folklore Department at MSGSU. Her current research is on the musical practices of Syrian musicians in Turkey.

Volkan Aslan is a faculty member at Istanbul University Faculty of Law, Department of Constitutional Law. He completed his master's degree at Istanbul University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Public Law in 2013. In the same year, she spent 3 months at the European Court of Human Rights to conduct research on her master's thesis. Between 2017-2018, she was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany for one year to conduct research on her doctoral thesis. Afterwards, she completed her PhD education at Istanbul University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Public Law in 2019. Since September 2011, she has been working at Istanbul University Faculty of Law, Department of Constitutional Law. She also teaches at Koç University Faculty of Law.