Nadia Noemí Franco Bazán

President of the Centro Internacional de Formación e Investigación Jurídica de Centroamérica (International Center for Legal Training and Research of Central America, CIFIJ Centroamérica)

Nadia Noemí Franco Bazán is a leading Panamanian jurist with a strong and extensive academic and professional career in criminal law, procedural law and criminology, establishing herself as one of the most authoritative voices in Central America in these fields. She holds a degree in law and political science from the Universidad de Panamá (1999) and a specialist qualification in criminological studies from that university's Instituto de Criminología (2000). She supplemented her training with a postgraduate qualification in higher education teaching from the Universidad Latina de Panamá (2000) and earned a master's degree in legal practice from the Universidad de Salamanca (2004). She also holds a doctorate in law from the Universidad de Salamanca (2014), with a solid grounding in various areas of criminal and procedural law, including multiple postgraduate qualifications and master's degrees obtained between 2013 and 2022. Over the course of her career she has completed specialized programs in criminal law, criminal procedural law, the adversarial criminal justice system and legal certainty in Ibero-America at institutions such as ULACIT, the Universidad Americana de Panamá, INEJ, UDELAS and, again, the Universidad de Salamanca. She is currently completing her master's thesis in criminological studies at the Instituto de Criminología de la Universidad de Panamá (ICRUP). In teaching, she has lectured in various undergraduate and master's programs at ISAE Universidad, including courses on procedural law, the adversarial criminal justice system and human rights. Since 2018 she has been a full professor of criminal procedural law at the Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Políticas of the Centro Regional Universitario de San Miguelito (CRUSAM), where she also coordinates the master's degree in law with a specialization in criminal law. Since the second semester of 2024 she has taken on Saturday classes in the doctoral program in law at the Universidad Católica Santa María La Antigua, further reinforcing her standing as a leading academic voice in the region. She currently holds key institutional roles as President of the Centro Internacional de Formación e Investigación Jurídica de Centroamérica (International Center for Legal Training and Research of Central America, CIFIJ Centroamérica) and Director of CIP Lex Panamá, positions from which she promotes specialized legal training, applied legal research and the connection between law and human rights at the regional level.