Gemma Davies

Associate Professor in Criminal Law, Durham University
Gemma joined Durham Law School as Associate Professor in Criminal Law in September 2022. Her research interests and expertise broadly lie at the intersection between criminal law and public international law. This includes exploring issues around transnational criminal law, extradition, European criminal law, Part Three of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and criminal jurisdiction amongst others. Her work aims to understand barriers to criminal justice cooperation, particularly between the UK and other states and seeks to facilitate better cooperation which also adequately protects the privacy and fundamental rights of citizens. In recent years she has worked on two funded projects which considered the implications of Brexit for criminal justice cooperation between the UK and Ireland and policing of the dark web. She has most recently written on UK access to electronic evidence stored overseas and the continued role EU data protection rules play in cooperation with third states such as the U.S., even after Brexit.

Her focus is on producing research which engages with policy and practice. She draws on her background as a barrister practising in criminal law from 2005 to 2012 and her many years of experience teaching students undertaking the vocational stage of qualification as a barrister at Northumbria University. Maintaining links with the profession continues to be important to her work. She regularly contributes to Parliamentary inquiries and consultations and has twice given oral evidence to a Parliamentary Committee which can be seen here and here. She has experience of writing policy focused research papers aimed at a non-academic audience and has written for think tanks such as UK in a Changing Europe and the LSE Brexit blog. She has made media appearances on radio and been cited by the Guardian, the BBC, and the Irish Times and the Irish Law Commission. She has also provided training to the judiciary on the extradition provisions of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

Outside of the university Gemma currently sits on the advisory board of the Independent Commission on UK-EU Relations focusing on the post-Brexit relationship between the UK and EU in the field of criminal justice and security cooperation. She is also an elected committee member of the European Criminal Law Association (UK) which aims to study, discuss and provide information on the development of the criminal law in Europe by means of seminars and publications. She also founded the UK-Irish Criminal Justice Cooperation Network with funding from the AHRC and previously was a committee member of the Association of Law Teachers. She has been Principal Investigator, Co-investigator or team member in 7 funded research projects which have been funded by the European Commission, Nordsfork, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the Society of Legal Scholars and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is book review editor of the International Journal of Evidence and Proof. She is currently the Bar Standards Board Lead External Examiner for Advocacy.