Dr. Olga Giakouminaki

Law

Dr. Olga Giakouminaki is a Teaching and Research Faculty Member at UNIC Athens.

Olga Giakouminaki is a lawyer based in Athens who specialises in EU administrative law, public procurement law and EU law. She holds a PhD in EU Administrative Law from the University of Paris 2 – Panthéon-Assas (2021). Her thesis, “The administrative acquis of the European public procurement legislation: a study on administrative law as an EU law integration tool”, was supervised by Professor Anastasia Iliopoulou-Penot, and Professor Jean-Bernard Auby chaired her defence committee. She also holds an LLM in European and Public Business Law (Master 2 Recherche) from the University of Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne and an LLM in Public Law (Master 2 Recherche) from Aix-Marseille University. She received her Bachelor of Laws from Democritus University of Thrace, where she graduated first among 155 graduates.

From 2022 to early 2025 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law of the University of Copenhagen. Her first project, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, examined how sustainable performance conditions are enforced in procurement supply chains. Her second project, funded by the Innovation Fund, looked at biodiversity clauses in procurement contracts as a new form of discretion for contracting authorities. During her doctoral studies she was a Graduate Visiting Researcher at the Institute of European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford, with a scholarship from the Maison Française d’Oxford. She was also a Visiting Doctoral Student at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lund.

She has taught at several universities, including the University of Copenhagen, the University of Oxford, Sciences Po Paris, the University of Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne and IDEF Law School in Athens. Her courses have covered EU law, EU sustainability law, EU company law, governmental contracts, public contracts law, the drafting and negotiation of international contracts, and French administrative and constitutional law. At Copenhagen she also supervised theses. In 2019 she coached the University of Oxford team that won first place at the Oxford French Law Moot Court.

Her research focuses on public procurement from the angle of EU administrative law. Her main themes are the legality principle, proceduralisation, the performance phase of public contracts, sustainability and due diligence. Her work has appeared in the Nordic Journal of European Law and E-politeia, and in a Bruylant collective volume on the principles of public law in Europe. Several more articles are forthcoming, including in the Public Procurement Law Review, the Review of European Administrative Law and the Cambridge Yearbook of Human Rights. She has taken part in more than 30 conferences, seminars and workshops.

Alongside her academic work, she has practised law since 2015 as a public procurement legal consultant in Athens. She advises both private companies and public entities, litigates before national and EU courts, and provides strategic advice on major infrastructure projects. From 2021 to 2023 she was a Legal Consultant to the Office of the President of the Hellenic Republic. Earlier, she was a legal trainee in the chambers of Judge Michail Vilaras, President of the Fourth Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union. She was also a Blue Book trainee at the European Commission’s DG GROW (Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs).

Greek is her native language, and she is fluent in English and French. She also speaks German at B2 level.