Profile

Dmytro Vovk is a Visiting Professor at New York Law School and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he teaches courses on international human rights, law and religion, and the rule of law. He is also an affiliated researcher of the Cardozo Institute of Holocaust and Human Rights and the Centre for Public, International, and Comparative Law at the University of Queensland. He was a Kenan-Fulbright fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a visiting researcher at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School. Vovk has delivered guest classes, lectures, and talks at University of Oxford, Northwestern University, the Pennsylvania State University, University of Alberta, University of Padua, University of Warsaw, University of Groningen, Central European University, Ukrainian Catholic University, U.S. State Department Foreign Service Institute, and the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics.

Vovk has been a rule of law, constitutional law, and religious freedom expert for several international institutions, including the UN Population Fund, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, UN Independent Expert on SOGI issues, the OSCE, several EU projects, the USAID, and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit. He also testified before and briefed the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the U.S. State Department, and the U.K. Foreign Office. As an international religious freedom expert, he has been involved in trainings; interfaith dialogue programs; and meetings for state officials, civil society, and religious leaders in Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, the Balkan countries, and Ukraine.

Vovk has advised the Ukrainian Government and the country’s State Agency for Ethnic Policies and Freedom of Conscience and submitted amicus briefs to the Constitutional Court of Ukraine. He has also contributed to the joint opinion of the OSCE/ODIHR and Venice Commission on Uzbekistan’s draft law on freedom of conscience and religious organizations. Since 2019, Vovk has been a member of the OSCE/ODIHR Expert Panel on Freedom of Religion or Belief, where he coordinates the working group on freedom of religion or belief and gender.

He has published and has been interviewed on law and religion, human rights, and comparative constitutional law. He has guest-edited issues for the Oxford Journal of Church and State, the Law, Religion and State Journal, the Review of Faith & International Affairs, the BYU Law Review, and others. He also edits the ICLRS blog, Talk About: Law and Religion. Currently, Vovk is writing a book on religious freedom and national security issues.