PEOPLE

PAULA BENEDICT

Paula Benedict supports Justice Collective with legal research on the legalization of cannabis. Paula is also a research assistant at the Chair of Criminal Law at the Free University of Berlin, where she heads the Law Clinic Practice of Criminal Defense. She is doing her doctorate on whistleblowing supported by a scholarship by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. She is also founder and board member of Fehlurteil und Wiederaufnahme e.V., which is committed to combating and researching wrongful convictions in Germany.

FRANZISKA DUDA

Franziska Duda (she/her) leads Justice Collective’s efforts to bring more people into courtwatching as activism. Her academic interests and specialization lie in the interdisciplinary fields of legal pluralism, sociology of law, and transformative justice. With her background as a mediator and jurist, she has a strong interest in restorative justice approaches and their implementation in Germany. As a legal activist, she has been working in the fields of criminal law, migration law, and labor law, among others, with the Refugee Law Clinic e.V..

LARA MÖLLER

Lara Möller leads Justice Collective’s research on racism in the criminal legal system. She is interested in abolitionist perspectives on state violence and how to interrupt the systemic abandonment and punishment of marginalized communities. Lara aspires to create resources that empower communities to advocate for safety and transformative justice. Lara is currently completing her master's in Social Justice and Community Action at the University of Edinburgh. As an activist, Lara is involved in campaigns against the expansion of police powers and criminalization. She advocates for non-reformist-reforms, such as the right to housing, the right to move and the abolition of KbOs (Kriminalitätsbelastete Orte) to move towards a society in which punishment is obsolete.

MITALI NAGRECHA

Mitali Nagrecha is the founder and coordinator of Justice Collective. Mitali was also the co-initiator of the Coalition to Abolish Debtors’ Prisons in Germany, and is an active member of the coalition’s efforts to abolish debtors’ prisons, as a first step to broader transformative change. Prior to moving to Europe, Mitali founded and directed Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program’s Criminal Justice Debt Initiative. For over ten years, Mitali advocated against racist practices of raising revenue by charging people fees and fines in criminal cases. During her time at CJPP, Mitali published a number of reports and articles, including The Limits of Fairer Fines: Lessons from Germany. You can learn more about Mitali’s work and publications here.

ANTHONY OBST

Anthony Obst is a writer, researcher, and editor at Justice Collective. He is also a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Graduate School of North American Studies. His dissertation draws on W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction as well as contemporary abolitionist theory and practice to trace abolition democracy as a conceptual framework in Black Marxist writing of the 1930s. As an activist, he is involved with Justice Collective and their coalition to end so-called substitute imprisonment in Germany (Bündnis zur Abschaffung der Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe).

ADVISORY BOARD

Vincent Bababoutilabo

Emmanuelle Debouverie

Anna-Rebecca Helmy

Daniel Loick

Manuel Matzke

Shaïn Morisse

Jorinde Schulz

Vanessa Thompson

Michèle Winkler