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Dmytro Vovk is a visiting professor of law and a legal scholar specializing in the rule of law, church state relations, and comparative constitutional law. He teaches War in Context, a course he developed. His home law school is the Yaroslav Muddy National Law University in Ukraine, where he runs the Center for the Rule of Law and Religion Studies. Because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine Vovk has relocated to the United States temporarily, with support from Yeshiva University and Cardozo School of Law. In his home country he also teaches at Ukrainian Catholic University.
He was a Kenan-Fulbright fellow at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a visiting researcher at Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School, and a visitor at Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. He is also an affiliated researcher of the Law and Religion in Asia-Pacific Program (University of Queensland School of Law).
Vovk delivered guest lectures and talks at Northwestern University, University of Padua, University of Catanzaro, University of Groningen, Central European University, and the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics. Vovk has been a rule of law, constitutional law, and religious freedom expert for several international institutions, including the UN Population Fund, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, OSCE, the EU-funded project “Pravo/Justice,” and USAID. As an international religious freedom expert, he was involved in trainings, interfaith dialogue programs and meetings for state officials, civil society, and religious leaders in Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, the Balkan countries, and Ukraine.
He has submitted FoRB-related amicus briefs and advised to the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, the Supreme Court of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian State Agency for Ethnic Policies and Freedom of Conscience. He has also contributed to the OSCE/ODIHR and the Venice Commission’s joint opinion on the draft on the new Uzbek religious law. He has prepared a brief on religious contribution to counteracting domestic violence in Ukraine for the UNFPA Ukraine, a mapping exercise on FoRB and gender in post-Soviet states for the OSCE/ODIHR, and a policy paper on religion and forced displacement in Ukraine within the project funded by the British Academy of Science. Since 2019 Vovk has been a member of the OSCE/ODIHR Expert Panel on Freedom of Religion or Belief (the only Ukrainian appointed to this panel since its establishment in the 1990s), where he coordinates the working group of freedom of religion or belief and gender.
He has published extensively on the rule of law in post-Soviet countries, law and religion, and church-state relations. He co-edited with Elizabeth A. Clark the volume “Religion during the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict” (Routledge, 2019), which Journal of Contemporary Religion called “a much-needed English introduction to a thorny set of religious, political, juridical, and related problems concerning the Eastern Ukrainian conflict”. He also co-edits the BYU ICLRS blog “Talk About: Law and Religion”.