Paulo Ilich Bacca is the Deputy Director of Dejusticia.

Paulo earned his Ph.D. in socio-legal studies from the University of Kent in the United Kingdom and was a European Research Council’s postdoctoral researcher at the Carlos III University of Madrid. In addition, he was a Fulbright-Humphrey Scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Latin American Studies and the AU-Washington College of Law. His basic training took place at the National University of Colombia, where he received a JD, an advanced degree in constitutional law, and a M.A. in philosophy of law.

Paulo directed Dejusticia’s ethnic-racial justice line, was the human rights analyst of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) and the coordinator of the freshwater preservation program of the Inter-American Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA). His areas of interest include the rights of Indigenous, Afro-descendants and Peasants peoples, international law, environmental justice, climate change, qualitative research methods, Latin American constitutionalism, and social and legal anthropology. Paulo teaches legal theory at the Javeriana University in Bogotá.