Thesis title

'The Art of Dignity: Ancestral Community and Collective Human Rights in the Aftermath of International Litigation'

Supervisors

Dr Richard Martin (Law), Dr Harry Walker (Anthropology)

Research interests/areas

human rights law, law and anthropology, collective rights, moral philosophy, political philosophy

Leonardo works on an ethnography of rights-consciousness and rights-centred mobilisation in the Garífuna villages of El Triunfo de la Cruz and San Juan, in Honduras. He follows local efforts to achieve the State’s compliance with the orders of reparations contained in two judgements by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2015 and 2023, respectively). Viewing the mobilisation of human rights law as a form of ritualised transformation of social crises, his project considers how the objectification of rights and the personification of the collective victim are processes that persist and diversify after litigation, as the victimised communities seek to repair the harms recognised by the Court as constitutive of human rights violations. His project relies on the concept of ‘collective dignity’ to direct the ethnographer’s attention towards the spatially and materially extensive, community-encompassing networks of theorisation and action involved in litigation and implementation, with an accentuated care for the roles of performance, emotion, memory, and creativity within local analyses and experiences of collective human rights.

Leonardo holds a Master of Laws degree from the LSE (with distinction in all subjects) and a Título de Abogado from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras (first in cohort). He has worked with the Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and with the Case Division of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. In Honduras he worked as a legal officer for the Norwegian Refugee Council, as well as in the penitentiary system and the judiciary.

 His studies are funded with a PhD Studentship awarded by the Department of Law of the LSE, and with a scholarship of the Modern Law Review (2024-25).