Faculty
Teaching staff
The faculty is listed below although not all tutors will teach every year.
Dapo Akande Yamani Fellow at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. He is also Co-Director, Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC). He was recently Visiting Associate Professor and Robina Foundation International Fellow at Yale Law School. Dapo is editor of EJIL:Talk!, blog of the European Journal of International Law. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Journal of International Law, the Editorial Board of the African Journal of International and Comparative Law, the Advisory Council of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, and the Executive Council of the British Branch of the International Law Association. He has acted as Consultant for the African Union on terrorism and the International Criminal Court. In addition, he advises and assists counsel in cases before a range of national and international tribunals.
Fareda Banda BL Hons, LLB (Zimbabwe), DPhil (Oxon). Fareda Banda is a Professor at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. Her areas of interest/expertise include the human rights of women, alternative dispute resolution and family law. Following her doctorate she worked as a Research Assistant at the Law Commission of England and Wales before returning to Oxford on a two year Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship. She edits the Journal of African Law and is an Associate Editor (Africa) of the International Survey of Family Law. Her publications include a book entitled Women, Law and Human Rights: An African Perspective. She also authored a report for the UN OHCHR on Laws that Discriminate against Women.
Margaret Bedggood LLB (University of Otago); MA (University of New Zealand and University College London); Hon. D (University of Waikato); QSO. Honorary Professor of Law, University of Waikato, New Zealand. Professor Bedggood, a former Dean of the Law Faculty at the University was an elected member of the International Executive Committee, Amnesty International from 1999 to 2005. Her research interests include all aspects of human rights law, both domestic and international, especially economic, social and cultural rights, and more recently the intersection of human rights, religion and theology. Prior to her appointment at the Waikato Law School, Professor Bedggood was the Chief Commissioner and Chair of the New Zealand Human Rights Commission from 1989 to 1994. She has been a member of the Refugee Council of New Zealand, the Council of the Peace Foundation and Chair of the Human Rights Foundation of Aoteoroa/ New Zealand. She has also served on various Anglican commissions and is a member of the (Anglican) Third Order of the Society of St. Francis.
Carolyn Patty Blum BA (University of Arizona); JD (Northeastern); Honorary D. Laws (Skidmore College, Bloomfield College); Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford. Professor Blum is a human rights consultant, working for a variety of NGOs and foundations. She also serves as the Senior Legal Adviser to the Center for Justice and Accountability on the Spanish case concerning the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador. Professor Blum is a Clinical Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley where she founded and directed the International Human Rights Law Clinic. She is Senior Research Fellow, Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley and Visiting Clinical Professor of Law, Cardozo Law School. Her areas of expertise and publication are refugee law, transitional justice and accountability, human rights and national security, and human rights and film; in addition, she has litigated dozens of asylum and human rights cases.
Robert Cryer LLB (Cardiff); LLM, PhD (Nottingham). Prof Cryer was a lecturer in the University of Manchester from 1999-2001 before returning to the School of Law, University of Nottingham in September 2001. He moved to Birmingham in April 2007. His major teaching and research interests are in international law and criminal law. In addition to a number of articles and book chapters he is the author of Prosecuting International Crimes: Selectivity and the International Criminal Law Regime (Cambridge: CUP, 2005) and co-author (with Håkan Friman, Darryl Robinson and Elizabeth Wilmshurst) of An Introduction to International Criminal Law and Procedure (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).He has recently finished writing a book on The Tokyo International Military Tribunal for Oxford University Press. He is book review editor of the Journal of Conflict and Security Law.
Nazila Ghanea BA (Keele), MA (Leeds), PhD (Keele). University Lecturer in International Human Rights Law, University of Oxford and Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. Her areas of expertise include non-discrimination, freedom of religion or belief, minority rights, questions surrounding discrimination and freedom of expression and human rights in the Middle East. She has published in these areas, including journal articles with the International and Comparative Law Quarterly and the Human Rights Quarterly and the publication of nine books. She has carried out funded research with the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the UK Economic and Social Research Council and has been an International Policy Fellow with the Open Society Institute. Her research has taken her for first hand research to a number of countries including Malaysia and the Middle East and she has lectured and carried out human rights training in many countries including China, Kyrgyzstan and Oman. She is the author of three UN papers and has presented at a number of UN seminars. She has also advised governments on a range of human rights matters particularly in relation to the protection of human rights. She is the Founding Editor of Religion and Human Rights, An International Journal.
Christof Heyns MA, LLB (Pretoria); LLM (Yale); PhD (Witwatersrand) was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial,summary or arbitrary executions in August 2010. He is Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and Co-director of the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa. He is an adjunct professor at the Washington College of Law of the American University in Washington DC, USA, and teaches in the human rights master’s programme at Oxford University, UK, where he is a Visiting Fellow. He has served as a consultant of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Organization of African Unity/African Union and the South African Human Rights Commission.He has published widely in the field of international human rights law, including the book The Impact of the United Nations Human Rights Treaties on the Domestic Level (with Frans Viljoen) and especially on human rights law in Africa (including the book Human Rights Law in Africa). He is a founding co-editor-in-chief of the African Human Rights Law Reports and was a founding co-editor of the African Human Rights Law Journal. He holds degrees in law and in philosophy from the Universities of Pretoria and the Witwatersrand, and Yale Law School. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard Law School during the first part of 2012.
Dino Kritsiotis is Professor of Public International Law at the University of Nottingham, where has taught since October 1994. He read law at the University of Wales College of Cardiff and at the University of Cambridge, from where he obtained his LL.M. with Distinction in June 1992. Professor Kritsiotis has taught at the University of Michigan Law School (2003, 2005-2008, 2010), the University of Melbourne (2011) and the University of New South Wales in Sydney (2012). In January 2011, he served as the Robert K. Castetter Distinguished Visiting Foreign Law Professor at California Western School of Law and, since 2011, he has been a regular member of the faculty for the Masters in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. Professor Kritsiotis specializes in general international law, the legal regulation of force and armed conflict, as well as the history and theory of international law and has published widely in these fields.
Philip Leach is Professor of Human Rights, a solicitor, and Director of the Human Rights and Social Justice Research Institute at London Metropolitan University. He is Director of the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC) (also based at London Metropolitan University) which advises and assists Russian and Georgian NGOs in litigating before the European Court of Human Rights. He was formerly Legal Director of Liberty and of the Kurdish Human Rights Project and has extensive experience of representing applicants before the European Court, in particular against the UK, Turkey and Russia. He is the author of ‘Taking a Case to the European Court of Human Rights’, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2005. He is a member of the Editorial Board of European Human Rights Law Review and a Trustee of the Media Legal Defence Initiative.
Jeremy McBride LLB (Cantab). Barrister, Monckton Chambers, London (2006-) and Visiting Professor, Central European University (1997-). He is also a Member (2008-) and Chair (2010-) of the Scientific Committee of the European Union's Fundamental Rights Agency and member of the Expert Council on NGO Law of the Council of Europe's Conference on INGOs (2008-). He is an expert on human rights law for the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Office of the High Commission for Human Rights and UNDP and is Editor, Butterworths Human Rights Cases and Consultant Editor, Commonwealth Human Rights Law Digest. He is the co-founder and Chair of INTERIGHTS (the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights) and was formerly Reader in International Human Rights Law, University ofBirmingham (1978-2006).
Juan E. Méndez holds an Abogado degree (JD equivalent) from the Stella Maris Catholic University, Mar del Plata, Argentina, and a certificate from the Washington College of Law, The American University, Washington, DC, USA (1980). He is admitted to the bar of the District of Columbia, USA and of Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata, Argentina. He teaches at the Washington College of Law and is currently the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. He is the author, with Marjory Wentworth, of Taking a Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. He was President of the International Center for Transitional Justice between 2004 and 2009. He is a Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford, and in 2009 and 2010 he was an Advisor to the Prosecutor, International Criminal Court, on Crime Prevention. In the summer of 2009 he was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Ford Foundation, New York. He is also former Special Advisor to the Secretary General (UN) on Prevention of Genocide. At Human Rights Watch he directed the Americas division (1982-1993) and was later General Counsel (1994-1996). He was Executive Director of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica (1996-1999). From 2000 to 2003 he was a member – and in 2002 the President – of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Organization of American States. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown Law School and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and he teaches regularly at the Oxford Masters Program in International Human Rights Law.
Rachel Murray LLB (Leicester), LLM (Bristol), PhD (University of West of England). Professor of International Human Rights Law, University of Bristol. Her specialist areas are human rights in Africa, particularly the African Charter and its Commission and Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Union, national human rights institutions, the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) and implementation. She has written in this area, including books with Hart Publishing and Cambridge University Press (Optional Protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture, OUP, 2011; The Role of National Human Rights Institutions at the International and Regional Levels, Hart Publishing, 2007; Human Rights in Africa, from Organization of African Unity to African Union, Cambridge, 2004; The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The System at Work, with Malcolm Evans, Cambridge, 2008; The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and International Law, Hart Publishing, 2000), and articles in leading legal human rights journals. She also advises organisations and individuals on how to use the African human rights system, including drafting cases and participating in its meetings. She is on the editorial board of a number of journals including the Journal of African Law and African Journal of International and Comparative Law. She has held two major grants with the AHRC and now directs the Human Rights Implementation Centre at the Bristol Law School. She is a member of the Board of the human rights organisation, Interights, a Fellow of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex and a member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College.
David Petrasek BA (University of Waterloo); LLB (Osgoode Hall, York University); LLM (London School of Economics); Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. Professor Petrasek has worked in the human rights and conflict resolution fields for over 20 years, with NGOs, the United Nations and research centres, including as Senior Director for Policy at Amnesty International, Research Director at the International Council for Human Rights Policy, and Policy Director at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. His areas of interest include the protection of human rights in times of conflict, the extension of human rights obligations to non-sate actors, the contribution of human rights advocacy to poverty eradication efforts, and the resolution of armed conflict through mediation. He has taught international human rights and humanitarian law courses at universities in Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Patricia Viseur Sellers BA (Rutgers); JD, (Univ. of Pennsylvania); Dra. Hon Causa (C.U.N.Y.); Visiting Fellow Kellogg College of the University of Oxford International lawyer and legal consultant in international human rights law, international criminal law, humanitarian law and human rights law. Special to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict and governments and I.Os and NGOs. Special Advisor on Prosecution Strategies to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. From 1994-2007, Professor Sellers was the Legal Advisor for Gender Related Crimes and Senior Acting Trial Attorney in the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In that capacity, she advised teams of investigators and trial attorneys on the prosecution of sex-based crimes under the tribunals' Statutes and pertinent doctrines of humanitarian law. She has lectured widely and authored numerous articles on international criminal law. The most recent is " Wartime FemaleSlavery : Enslavement?" in the Cornell University Journal of International law. Prior to her work as an international prosecutor, Professor Sellers served at the Directorate General for External Relations at the European Commission, the Ford Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, and the Philadelphia Defender Association. She is the recipient of the American Society of International Law's Prominent Women in International Law award.
Andrew Shacknove AB (Bowdoin); PhD (Yale); JD (Harvard); MA (Oxon). Dr Shacknove is Director of the International Human Rights Law programmes, including the MSt, at Oxford, and University Lecturer in Law. From 1990-92 he was the Joyce Pearce Research Fellow and a Senior Common Room member at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and from 1993-2010 a Governing Body Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. Dr Shacknove has worked with refugees and other immigrants in New York, Boston, Miami, with the UNHCR in Malaysia, and in Oxford with immigration detainees. He was for many years an instructor on refugee and human rights law for the United Kingdom Home Office Asylum Division. He has written on the refugee definition, asylum, ethical aspects of refugee policy and refugee status determination procedures in Europe and North America.
Patrick Thornberry CMG LLB (London), LLM, PhD (Keele) is Professor of International Law at Keele University and Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford. Since 2001, Professor Thornberry has been the UK member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and acted as Rapporteur of that Committee from 2002-2008. Among his many publications, works such as International Law and the Rights of Minorities (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991), Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights (Manchester University Press, 2002), and (with M. Amor Martin), Minorities in Europe (Council of Europe Publishing, 2004) are prominent in the field of international law and human rights. Professor Thornberry is a former Chairman of Minority Rights Group and has worked as legal consultant to a variety of intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. In HM Queen Elizabeth’s New Years Honours List of 2006, Patrick Thornberry was awarded a CMG – Companion of St Michael and St George – for services to international human rights, on the nomination of the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
Geraldine Van Bueren QC LLB (Wales); LLM (London) is Professor of International Human Rights Law and Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford. She is a barrister and an Associate Tenant at Doughty Street Chambers and a Bencher in the Middle Temple. She has served as a Commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Her most recent books are Law’s Duty to Poor (UNESCO 2010) and Child Rights in Europe (Council of Europe 2008 ) From 2002 to 2006 Professor Van Bueren held a second concurrent chair W P Schreiner Professor, Professor of International Human Rights Law at the University of Cape Town. In 2003, Professor Van Bueren was awarded the Child Rights Lawyer Award. She is one of the original drafters of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. She cofounded INTERIGHTS an international human rights law centre based in London. Her writings have been cited in courts and legislatures around the world including the European Court of Human Rights, the Constitutional Court of South Africa and the US Senate.
Frans Viljoen (MA, LLB, LLD (Pretoria); LLM (Cambridge)) is Director of the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. He is also the academic co-ordinator of the LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa), presented by the Centre, in collaboration with twelve partner law faculties across Africa. He has been involved in advocacy and training in and on the African regional human rights system, and published widely on international human rights law, including International human rights law in Africa (Oxford University Press, second edition, 2012). He is editor-in-chief of the African Human Rights Law Journal and co-editor of the English and French versions of the African Human Rights Law Reports.
Former teaching staff include:
Prof Abdullahi A.An-Na`im
Professor of Law, Emory University
Prof Carlos Ayala
Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights Law, Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas
Mr Hasan Bakirci
Senior Lawyer, European Court of Human Rights
Prof Christine Chinkin
Professor of International Law, London School of Economics
Dr Radhika Coomaraswamy
Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict
Prof Marie-Bénédicte Dembour
Professor of Law and Anthropology, University of Sussex
Justice Richard Goldstone
Constitutional Court of South Africa
Prof Paul Hoffman
Schonbrun, De Simone, Seplow, Harris and Hoffman LLP
Ms Hina Jilani
Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan.
Mr John McManus
Counsel, Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Section, Department of Justice, Canada
Prof William Schabas
Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway
Prof Sigrun Skogly
Professor of Human Rights Law, Lancaster University
Prof David Weissbrodt
Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School