Teaching staff
Cecile Aptel is the Senior Legal Policy Advisor to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. She is also Associate Professor of International law at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Extraordinary Professor at the Centre for Human Rights of the University of Pretoria.She has advised on transitional justice, rule of law and judicial reforms in several countries in Africa, Europe, and the Middle-East, and has a large experience in international criminal justice, having worked as a legal advisor at the UN international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and having contributed to the establishment of the War Crimes Chamber in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.Her current research focuses on international criminal law, transitional justice and child rights.
Vera Gowlland Debbas is Emeritus Professor of Public International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, a Visiting Professor at University College London (UCL) and an Academic Member of Doughty Street Chambers, London. She has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley and Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris II among others and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She has also taught at The Hague Academy of International Law, European University Institute, Florence; and Institut des droits de l’homme, Strasbourg. Her main publications include her Hague Academy course on The Security Council and Issues of Responsibility in International Law (2011): The Security Council as Enforcer of Human Rights, Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law (2011); and Collective Responses to Illegal Acts in International Law (1990) (ASIL Certificate of Merit). She has also written extensively on general issues of international law, including refugee and human rights law. She was a rapporteur for the UN Commission on Human Rights and Counsel for the Arab League in the 2005 International Court of Justice Wall Opinion. She currently counsels Governments, IOs and private law firms.
Colin Harvey is Professor of Human Rights Law, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast. He is a member of the Academic Panel at Doughty Street Chambers in London. He served as Head of the Law School at Queen’s (2007-2012), as a member of Senate (2010-2012) and as Director of the Human Rights Centre (2005-2008). He was Professor of Constitutional and Human Rights Law at the University of Leeds from 2000-2005. He has held Visiting Professorships at the London School of Economics, the University of Michigan, and Fordham University. Professor Harvey served on the Northern Ireland Higher Education Council (2002-2006), and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (2005-2011). He has published extensively on human rights. He is the General Editor of Human Rights Law in Perspective published by Hart Publishing, Oxford (a new book series he founded in 2001). He is on the editorial board of Human Rights Law Review, European Human Rights Law Review, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly and is the Case Editor for the International Journal of Refugee Law.
Christof Heyns (MA LLB University of Pretoria; LLM Yale Law School; PhD University of the Witwatersrand) is Professor of Human Rights Law and Co-director of the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa at the University of Pretoria. He is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. Professor Heyns is an adjunct professor at the Washington College of Law of the American University in Washington DC, USA, and a Visiting Fellow at Kellog College at Oxford University, UK. During the first part of 2012 he was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. He is a former Director of the Centre for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, as well as former Dean of that faculty. He has published widely in the field of international human rights law.
Ratna Kapur is a Global Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School in Sonepat, India. She is also on the faculty of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. She has published extensively on issues of feminist legal theory, postcolonial theory, and human rights. Her work explores the relationship between law, rights, gender, and culture in a postcolonial as well as global legal context. Her latest book is Makeshift Migrants and Law: Gender, Belonging and Postcolonial Anxieties (Routledge, 2010), which examines the construction of the migrant subject in law and unpacks how the politics of inclusion and exclusion operates in and through rights discourse.
Susan Karamanian is Associate Dean for International and Comparative Legal Studies at The George Washington University School of Law. Before joining GW Law in 2000, she spent 14 years in private practice in Dallas, Texas where she represented domestic and foreign clients in litigation matters. She also maintained an active pro bono practice on behalf of death-row inmates in Texas. She has held leadership positions in the American Society of International Law, including having been Vice-President. She is on the board of the Center for American and International Law, the Texas Appleseed Foundation, the Washington Foreign Law Society and the Friends of the Law Library of Congress. She is also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. In 2007, she was Director of Studies, Public International Law (English-speaking) at the Hague Academy of International Law. She is a graduate of Auburn University (B.S), Oxford University (B.A.), where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Texas (J.D.).
David Kinley holds the Chair in Human Rights Law at University of Sydney. He is also an Academic Panel member of Doughty Street Chambers in London. His particular expertise is in human rights and the global economy, focusing on the respective roles and responsibilities of corporations and states. He has previously held teaching positions Cambridge University, ANU, University of New South Wales, Washington College of Law, American University, and Paris 1 (La Sorbonne). He was also the founding Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2004, based in Washington DC, and the Herbert Smith Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge in 2008. He has written and edited eight books and more than 80 articles, book chapters, reports and papers, and worked for nearly 20 years as a consultant and adviser on international and domestic human rights law in (or with agencies from) China, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Bangladesh, Thailand, Iraq, Nepal, Laos, the Pacific Islands, and Myanmar. He has worked for wide range of international organizations, including the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Bank, the European Union, the Ford Foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the UNDP, AusAID, and the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions, as well as transnational corporations and NGOs. He has also previously worked for three years with the Australian Law Reform Commission and two years with the Australian Human Rights Commission.
David Kretzmer (LLB, LLM Jerusalem; Dr.Jur Osgoode Hall) is Professor Emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Professor of Law, Sapir Academic College, Israel. He was a Member of the Human Rights Committee from 1995 to 2002, Professor of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1974 to 2006, Director of the Hebrew University Center for Human Rights from 1993 to 2000 and Professor of Law, University of Ulster from 2006 to 2009. He has taught constitutional law, human rights, humanitarian law and international law. His books include The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel (1990, second edition in Arabic 2002); The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories (2002). Recent articles have appeared in leading law journals, including the AJIL and EJIL. His present research concentrates on human rights in situations of conflict.
Michael Matheson has taught at George Washington University Law School since 2002, and has also taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Gottingen and the Hague Academy. He has published a number of books and articles. He was a member of the UN International Law Commission, and has argued many cases before international tribunals, including the International Court of Justice. He served for more than 28 years as an attorney at the U.S. Department of State, including as Acting Legal Adviser of the Department.He is a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Advisory Committee on Public International Law of the U.S. State Department.
Frédéric Mégret is an associate-Professor at the Faculty of Law, McGill University and is the Canada Research Chair in the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. He holds an LlB from King's College London, a masters in international law from the Sorbonne and a PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Before teaching at McGill, he taught at the University of Toronto, worked at the European University Institute (Florence) and for the International Committee of the Red Cross. As part of his military service in the French army he worked as a peacekeeper in Sarajevo in 1995. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming second edition of the United Nations and Human Rights (Oxford University Press) and has published widely on the international law of human rights particularly its general theory and history. He has been a consultant to the Council of Europe and the Canadian department of justice on human rights issues.
Patricia Sellers (BA Rutgers; JD Pennsylvania) is an International Criminal Lawyer/Independent Consultant. She is also Member of UN Expert Panel to evaluate the Office of internal Oversight's investigations and Special Legal Advisor to the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict. She is former Special Legal Advisor to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. From 1994-2007, Dr 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 advised governments, international organizations, and civil society entities on international criminal law and gender. Prior to her work as an international prosecutor, she served as a Co-Desk at the Directorate General for External Relations at the European Commission, an assistant program officer at the Ford Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, and a trial attorney at the Philadelphia Defender Association.
Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Ms. Sepulveda is a Chilean lawyer who holds a Ph.D in International Human Rights Law from Utrecht University in the Netherlands; an LL.M in human rights law from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom and a post graduate diploma in comparative law from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Ms. Sepulveda has worked as a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, as a staff attorney at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and as the Co-Director of the Department of International Law and Human Rights of the United Nations-mandated University for Peace in San Jose, Costa Rica. She also served as a consultant to the Division of International Protection of UNHCR and to the Norwegian Refugee Council in Colombia. More recently she has been Research Director at the International Council on Human Rights Policy in Geneva and Research Fellow at the Norwegian Center for Human Rights and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.