Global Fellow
Alida Rita Steigler is a doctoral fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo, where she has been based since April 2023. She is affiliated with the ENROL project (Enforcing the Rule of Law in the European Union), an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Public and International Law and the ARENA Centre for European Studies, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
She completed her law degree at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Hungary in 2020, including an Erasmus exchange year at the University of Bergen. Between 2019 and 2023, she was associated with the University of Bergen and the Christian Michelsen Institute through various roles, including trainee and research assistant at the Centre on Law and Social Transformation. She also worked for 1.5 years on the EU Horizon-funded project PROTECT – The Right to International Protection as a communications coordinator.
Her doctoral research examines the European Union’s constitutional mandate to safeguard the rule of law across Member States and candidate countries. She argues that the past 16 years of democratic backsliding require a shift from discretionary political dialogue to legally constrained enforcement within the EU’s membership framework. Drawing on a cumulative reading of Articles 2, 7, 13, and 49 TEU, alongside Article 7 TFEU and the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, her work conceptualizes the rule of law as a non-negotiable prerequisite for membership that EU institutions are legally and normatively obligated to protect consistently, without double standards.
In addition to her research, she teaches EU/EEA law and international human rights law at the University of Oslo.