Viktoriia Hamaiunova is a socio-legal scholar working across human rights, procedural justice, civil justice, mediation, legal culture and institutional design. Her research is concerned with a deceptively simple question: what makes a legal or quasi-legal procedure genuinely capable of delivering justice, rather than merely appearing procedurally complete? She examines the institutional conditions under which rights such as access to justice, the right to a fair trial, meaningful participation and effective remedy remain substantive in practice, particularly as justice systems become more standardised, administratively complex and technologically mediated.
Her current research develops a broader programme on rights-compatible procedural vitality. It examines how courts, mediation schemes, grievance mechanisms, complaint systems, integrity processes and other remedy structures can preserve their formal architecture while gradually losing the capacities that make those procedures meaningful: voice, contestability, professional judgement, responsiveness, effective remedy and institutional learning. The project is particularly interested in the divergence between what institutions visibly provide — procedures, safeguards, review stages, reporting structures and human-oversight requirements — and the informal assumptions, organisational incentives and professional practices that determine how those mechanisms actually function.
Within this programme, Viktoriia is developing a diagnostic approach to procedural ritualisation: the point at which procedural forms continue to be reproduced even though their underlying normative function has weakened. Her work investigates, among other questions, how performance metrics can reshape institutional definitions of success; when professional discretion remains formally available but becomes difficult to exercise in practice; how complaint and grievance systems distinguish genuine remedy from administrative closure; and whether feedback mechanisms produce institutional learning or simply document participation.
A further strand examines AI-supported justice and procedural governance. Rather than approaching artificial intelligence primarily as a technical problem, Viktoriia studies its institutional effects. Her research considers what happens when tasks such as intake, classification, screening, summarisation, triage, drafting and review are redistributed between human professionals and automated systems. Particular attention is given to source contact, meaningful human oversight, professional judgement, contestability, accountability and the ability of institutions to recognise exceptional or difficult cases. This work asks not simply whether a human remains formally involved in a process, but whether that person retains the information, authority, time and responsibility required to exercise meaningful judgement.
This research programme grows directly out of Viktoriia’s doctoral work on the right to a fair trial and the transformation of civil justice through mediation. She completed her doctoral research in Law at Newcastle University in 2026. Her thesis, New Institutional Approach on Right to a Fair Trial in the Context of Article 6 ECHR: Mediation as Court and Court as Mediation, examines how the increasing integration of mediation into judicial systems changes the institutional meaning of a fair trial. It challenges a simple division between adjudication and alternative dispute resolution and instead analyses contemporary civil justice as an increasingly hybrid environment in which courts, mediators and parties may perform overlapping procedural functions.
The doctoral project combined doctrinal, comparative and empirical socio-legal research. Viktoriia analysed the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, compared mediation and civil-justice developments across Council of Europe jurisdictions, and designed and conducted semi-structured elite interviews with judges of the European Court of Human Rights. The research also developed a comparative framework for analysing adjudication, mediation and hybrid procedural arrangements through dimensions including institutional role, autonomy, confidentiality, access to adjudication and procedural safeguards.
Legal culture is a recurring theme across her work. Viktoriia has developed the distinction between visible and implicit legal culture to analyse why formally similar procedural institutions can operate differently across legal systems and organisations. Visible rules, official policies and institutional structures are considered alongside professional habits, assumptions, expectations and incentives that shape their practical operation. This perspective connects her earlier comparative work on European mediation and judicial modernisation with her current research on grievance systems, bureaucratisation, AI-supported procedures and institutional learning.
Viktoriia’s recent research experience includes the Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, where she worked as a Research Officer in 2026. Her work there sat at the intersection of international law, human rights, technology and justice. She contributed to research papers and policy-facing briefings, developed and analysed datasets on the use and regulation of AI, mapped jurisdictional and institutional approaches to technology and justice, and systematised human-rights jurisprudence for comparative research resources concerned with fair-trial and access-to-justice outcomes. The role strengthened the technological and policy dimensions of her wider research on institutional design and rights-compatible justice systems.
She was previously a PhD Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, where she developed the comparative and theoretical dimensions of her doctoral work on mediation, legal culture and procedural design. During a traineeship at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, she worked directly with an ECtHR judge, conducting research on human-rights law and case law and contributing to academic and professional materials. Her wider research experience has also included mixed-methods research on equality, diversity and inclusion in higher education at Newcastle University and research on gender equality in nominations to the International Court of Justice.
Her methodological practice therefore extends beyond conventional doctrinal legal research. It includes comparative socio-legal analysis, semi-structured elite interviewing, focus groups, thematic coding, documentary and institutional analysis, survey research, quantitative analysis using SPSS and Stata, stakeholder and systems mapping, and interdisciplinary policy research. She is particularly interested in combining doctrinal analysis with empirical evidence about how institutions and professionals actually interpret and implement legal norms.
Viktoriia has published on mediation, human rights, legal culture and civil justice. Her work has appeared in The International Journal of Human Rights, Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Mediation Theory and Practice and the Athens Journal of Law. Her research has examined the human-rights limits of mandatory mediation, autonomy and compulsion in dispute resolution, the historical transformation of mediation in European legal systems, changing judicial roles and the influence of visible and implicit legal cultures on institutional reform. She is also co-author, with Bryan Clark, of a chapter on the Singapore Convention on Mediation in an Edward Elgar volume on mediation within modern civil justice.
Her forthcoming and developing work extends this agenda in several directions. It examines confidentiality and the public-hearing principle in mediated justice; comparative forms of civil procedure; settlement pressure and judicial boundary work; legal certainty in court-connected mediation; bureaucratic language and procedural templates; human–AI cognitive allocation; the relationship between formal oversight and meaningful judgement; and the transferability of procedural-vitality indicators between public justice and corporate remedy systems.
A related strand of Viktoriia’s research concerns inclusive dialogic feedback and assessment in higher education. Drawing on work in feedback literacy, inclusive design and dialogic pedagogy, she examines whether feedback systems can remain relational, critical and educationally meaningful when universities face pressures of scale, standardisation and automation. This work has also informed the broader Feedback Vitality dimension of her institutional research: the idea that feedback should be assessed not simply by whether it is collected, but by whether it enables challenge, reveals weaknesses and produces organisational learning.
Alongside research, Viktoriia has substantial experience in university teaching, curriculum design and assessment. She has served as Visiting Lecturer and Module Convenor in Human Rights Law at the University of Roehampton and has taught mediation, international commercial dispute resolution, legal institutions and research-related subjects at Newcastle University. Her teaching combines doctrinal analysis with simulations, case clinics, problem-based learning, legal-design exercises and structured feedback. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
Viktoriia is also active in academic publishing and professional service. She is Co-Editor of the Policy and Practice section of Mediation Theory and Practice and serves as a reviewer for the Athens Journal of Law. She has contributed to mentoring initiatives in international law, including programmes associated with the American Society of International Law and the European Society of International Law, supporting early-career researchers with academic development, research strategy and international-law career pathways.
Her academic research is informed by earlier legal practice and professional experience in the United Kingdom, Estonia and Ukraine. She has worked in in-house and consultancy roles and previously interned at Sorainen. This practical experience contributes to her interest in the difference between law as formally articulated and law as operationalised inside institutions — through documents, professional judgement, organisational incentives, procedural routines and interactions with those who use legal systems.
Viktoriia holds an MA in International Law and Human Rights from the University of Tartu and a law degree with honours from Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University. Her academic and professional experience across several European legal systems informs a comparative approach that treats legal institutions not as isolated sets of rules, but as evolving social and organisational environments.
Across these different strands, her work is connected by a common concern: how institutions can preserve meaningful justice when procedural systems change. Whether the context is a court, mediation process, grievance mechanism, university feedback system or AI-supported workflow, the central question is whether institutional design continues to sustain genuine participation, contestability, judgement, remedy and learning.