Ekaterina Aristova

Between 2019 and 2025 Ekaterina was a Research Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Faculty of Law, University of Oxford).

Ekaterina is an academic and a lawyer specialising in the field of business and human rights. Her work focuses on strategic human rights and environmental litigation. She examines how conventional private law doctrines evolve in response to global challenges and are used creatively in different jurisdictions to foster human rights and environmental accountability. Ekaterina is the author of ‘Tort Litigation against Transnational Corporations: The Challenge of Jurisdiction in English Courts’ (OUP 2024), a revised manuscript of a PhD thesis completed at the University of Cambridge. She is also a co-editor of ‘Civil Remedies and Human Rights in Flux’ (Hart Publishing 2022) and ‘Civil Liability for Human Rights Violations: A Handbook for Practitioners’ (Bonavero Institute of Human Rights 2022).

Ekaterina has now joined Surrey Law School as a Senior Lecturer in Private Law in 2025 after six years at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, where she remains an Associate Fellow. Katya is also an Academic Fellow of Middle Temple and author of Tort Litigation against Transnational Corporations (OUP 2024). She convened a course ‘Business and Human Rights - Real World Accountability’ and supervises postgraduate students. In 2019-2022, Ekaterina coordinated a project on civil liability for human rights violations funded by Oak Foundation. In 2022, she was awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to complete a project on corporate climate change litigation. Ekaterina is regularly invited as a guest lecturer and speaker to teach or talk about international litigation, ESG governance, climate change and business and human rights.  

In the last few years, Ekaterina also served as a consultant on several research projects that have sought to strengthen corporate accountability for human rights violations. Prior to commencing her academic career, she practised corporate law, specialising in all aspects of M&A transactions, completing a training contract in White & Case’s Moscow office before spending seven years as a senior in-house lawyer at two leading Russian investment companies.

You can follow Ekaterina on Twitter.