Dr Melanie Fink is Assistant Professor of European Law at Leiden University. Her research explores the intersection of digital public administration and EU law from an individual rights perspective. She is particularly interested in administrative justice in the automated state, accountability and access to justice, especially in EU border management, and the interplay between EU constitutional law and the regulation of digital technologies. With a three-year NWO-Veni grant (2025-2028), Melanie currently works on the role of explanation rights and ‘human-in-the-loop’ mechanisms to safeguard human dignity when public authorities deploy AI systems.

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Dr Melanie Fink is Assistant Professor of European Law at Leiden University. Previously she was affiliated with the Central European University and the University of Vienna. She was also a Visiting Professor at Católica University Lisbon and a Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge.

Her research explores the intersection of digital public administration and EU law from an individual rights perspective. Melanie focuses on three key themes: (1) administrative justice in the automated state, (2) accountability and access to justice in EU border management, and (3) the interplay between EU constitutional law and the regulation of digital technologies.

1) Melanie examines how to preserve administrative justice principles when public authorities deploy automated technologies. She is particularly interested in the role of the duty to reason and other explanation rights to safeguard human dignity in the automated state. Her research also explores how these rights relate to ‘human-in-the-loop’ requirements and their combined effectiveness in ensuring procedural justice. Melanie was awarded a three-year NWO-Veni grant (2025-2028) to conduct research on this topic.

2) Melanie’s work also scrutinizes EU-level mechanisms to ensure accountability and meaningful access to justice. With a four-year research grant awarded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences under the APART-GSK scheme, from 2021 to 2025, Melanie studied the capacity of the EU’s remedies system to provide individual victims of fundamental rights violations with effective mechanisms for redress. A specific focus of Melanie’s work in this area are EU border management practices and technologies, with particular emphasis on the role and accountability of the EU agency Frontex.

3) More broadly, Melanie investigates the complex interplay between EU constitutional law and instruments that regulate digital technologies. Her specific interest lies in examining how fundamental rights trickle down into and (should) shape the development and interpretation of these regulatory regimes.

Melanie’s scholarship has been published in leading law journals and University presses. Past projects focused on human oversight under the EU AI Act (2025), explanation requirements in EU law and the automation of public administration (European Law Review 2022), EU border technology (2024), redress against violations of EU law by the EU (Cambridge University Press 2024; Common Market Law Review 2019), and the legal accountability of Frontex (Oxford University Press 2018; German Law Journal 2020). A full list of her publications, including links to access them, can be found here.

Melanie is a member of the European Society of International Law (ESIL), where she serves in the Coordinating Committee of the Interest Group on the EU as a Global Actor. She is also active in the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S), the Standing Committee of Experts in International Immigration, Refugee and Criminal Law (Meijers Committee), and the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research (NNHRR). Melanie is a board member of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence in AI and procedural justice (JUST-AI) at the University of Liège and the NOVA Platform for European Administrative and Regulatory Law (NOVA PEARL) at NOVA University Lisbon.

Activities