Miriam Cohen is an Associate Professor and holds the Canada Research Chair on Human Rights and International Reparative Justice at University of Montreal’s Faculty of Law, where she teaches and researches in international, public and human rights law. She is the recipient of the Scholarly Book Award of the Canadian Council on International Law and the Legal competition Award of the Quebec Bar Foundation for her book Realizing Reparative Justice for International Crimes: From Theory to Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She is also co-author of the 3rd edition of the Précis de droit international public with Professor Stéphane Beaulac (LexisNexis, 2021). Professor Cohen obtained her PhD from Leiden University. She was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow and John Peters Humphrey scholar during her graduate studies at Harvard Law School. She obtained a Master of Laws (LLM) from the University of Cambridge as a Rt. Honourable Paul Martin Sr scholar, and both a Law degree (LLB) and a Master of Laws (LLM) from Université de Montréal. 

She is the founder of the Human Rights and International Justice Lab, where she supervises interdisciplinary research teams developing a specialized digital platform for the analysis of human rights jurisprudence. The project, developed in partnership with the Centre d'expertise numérique en recherche (CEN-R) of the University of Montreal, received a research infrastructure grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) through the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, and a grant from the Government of Quebec for the creation of the digital research infrastructure, for a total of nearly $400,000 (phase 1). 

Before her academic career, Professor Cohen gained extensive experience in international organizations. She worked in the legal department at the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) and previously at the Appeals Chamber and Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). As a Harvard Law School researcher, she served as rapporteur for a committee of experts on a draft convention on crimes against humanity, and as a member of a delegation to a UN treaty negotiation in Geneva. As legal counsel (international law expert), she appeared before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Hamburg). As an international lawyer (member of the Quebec Bar) and accredited mediator, she recently acted as co-counsel for an intervener before the Supreme Court of Canada and as amicus curiae before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. 

Recipient of several awards, fellowships and grants, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Bar Association (Law for the Future Fund), the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) and the Legal Research Foundation, she collaborates with several interdisciplinary and international research teams. She has published over 40 papers in leading law journals and books in Canada, the United States, Europe, Indonesia, South Korea and Brazil. 

Professor Cohen acts regularly as a consultant, panelist and trainer in the fields of international law and human rights. She is the Vice-president of the Quebec Society of International Law and a member of the Board of directors of the Canadian Council on International Law and of Lawyers without Borders (Canada). She is also a researcher at the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP), the Centre international de criminologie comparée (CICC) and the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CÉRIUM). Before joining Université de Montréal, from 2015 to 2018, she was an Assistant Professor of Law at Lakehead University (Ontario), where she lectured on international law and Canadian public law, and acted as the Co-Editor-in-chief of the Lakehead Law Journal (2017-2018). Professor Cohen is originally from Brazil and she works in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French, and has basic knowledge of Italian and Dutch.