Within the international research program that Agirre Lehendakaria Center and its Foundation (ALC-ALF) promote and encourage together with the AC4 (Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity) at Columbia University, Professor Jon Landa has just started his research stay in New York.

Landa is already working at Columbia University, where he will mainly carry out two tasks.

Firstly, to finalize a study of the situation of hate crimes, particularly taking into account a comparison in their design and application in the United States with respect to the trends in European countries. In this regard, one of the similarities that has already been detected is the "deviation" of this type of regulation towards fields outside its historical matrix: that is, using hate crimes not so much to protect historically marginalized and discriminated minorities, but to repress and deal with more ideological phenomena, of extremist tendency, which in the American literature is known as "domestic terrorism". 

The second line of research is aimed at collecting the literature and initiating the study of the crime of ecocide as a possible "new" international crime, for which the Earth Institute of Columbia University, in which the AC4 center is integrated, represents an ideal place for an interdisciplinary approach.

The research residency also becomes an opportunity for Basque researchers due to the wide network of contacts and high-level interlocutors that Columbia University itself offers. 

Jon Landa's profile

Jon-M. Landa is currently Professor of Criminal Law at the Faculty of Law -Bizkaia- of the University of the Basque Country (UVP-EHU) and Director of the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Public Authorities UPV/EHU (http://www.katedraddhh.eus).

His main lines of research have to do with racism, xenophobia, discrimination as well as hate crimes, terrorism, crimes against humanity and penology.

Landa has been visiting professor or researcher, among others, at the universities of Hamburg (2000 DAAD), Heidelberg (2004 DAAD) and, recently, at the Lauterpatch Centre for International Law of the University of Cambridge (UK, 2010, 2011,2012, 2014), Vienna (2016), Edinburgh (2018) or Berlin (2019, 2022).