The members of the Odysseus Academic Network have learned with surprise and sadness of the passing of Kristine Kruma, our Latvian colleague in the network. Kristine joined Odysseus after the enlargement process and has been an active member of our network since 2004, always ready to help with simplicity and efficiency. In May, she was still kindly promoting our Summer School in the Riga Law School. She actively participated in several initiatives and projects in addition to her busy career as a member of the Constitutional Court of Latvia and recently as Pro-Rector of the Riga School of law.
Kristine was a very active lawyer in the field of Human Rights, being an ad hoc judge at the European Court of Human Rights as well as a member of the Scientific Committee of the Fundamental Rights Agency in the European Union. Many of her publications were about the law on nationality and citizenship at international and European level as well as in Latvian law.
We present our sincerest condolences to her family.
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Testimony of our colleague Kees Groenendijk from the Netherlands:
Today we mourn Kristine Kruma.
Kristine was a courageous and modest person, an intelligent and original academic. She served Latvia, Europe and the academic world in a range of high judicial, advisory and academic capacities. Since Latvia’s accession to the EU she was an active member of our Network.
We had the great pleasure of getting to know Kristine better during her stay as a guest researcher in Nijmegen where she was working on her PhD. Personally, I had the honor of acting as the opponent when she successfully defended her dissertation in public in Lund. Her PhD was recently published as a book in the series by Brill/Martinus Nijhoff under the title “EU citizenship, nationality and migrant status” (2014).
We all lost a great colleague and friend.
Our thoughts are with Kristine’s daughter and her whole family.
Kristine will continue to live in our memories.