The 30th Anniversary of the Summer School in International Human Rights Law: Looking Back and Looking Forward

Join us in celebrating The 30th Anniversary of the Summer School: Looking Back and Looking Forward—a milestone event honoring three decades of learning. teaching and collaboration in the field of human rights.. This commemorative occasion will reflect on the program’s rich history, its impact on generations of students and teachers, and its evolution to respond to emerging challenges and themes in the field of human rights research, practice, and education.

Dr Nazila Ghanea is Professor in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. She serves as Associate Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub and is a Fellow of Kellogg College (BA Keele, MA Leeds, PhD Keele, MA Oxon). She serves as a member of the OSCE Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief and on the Board of Trustees of the independent think tank, the Universal Rights Group. She has been a visiting academic at a number of institutions including Columbia and NYU, and previously taught at the University of London and Keele University, UK and in China. Nazila’s research spans freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, women’s rights, minority rights and human rights in the Middle East. Her publications include nine books, five UN publications as well as a number of journal articles and reports. Her research has been funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, Open Society and the QNRF. She has been invited to address UN expert seminars on seven occasions. From 2012-2014 she is co-leading a research team to look at the Domestic Impact of UN Treaty Ratification in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. From 2010-2013 she was part of a research term investigating ‘Religion and Belief, Discrimination and Equality in England and Wales: Theory, Policy and Practice’ (2010-2013). She has also received a number of university scholarships and academic awards. Nazila has acted as a human rights consultant/expert for a number of governments, the UN, UNESCO, OSCE, Commonwealth, Council of Europe and the EU. She has facilitated international human rights law training for a range of professional bodies around the world, lectured widely and carried out first hand human rights field research in a number of countries including Malaysia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. She is a regular contributor to the media on human rights matters. 

Patty Blum, J.D. has been part of the faculty of the Oxford International Human Rights Law programme since its inception as a summer school and helped develop that course’s advocacy components. She assisted with the design of the Master’s in International Human Rights Law and became part of its inaugural faculty. She is an Academic Affiliate at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights.   

Patty is a Clinical Professor of Law, Emerita, at Berkeley Law, University of California. She began her teaching career at Berkeley in 1980. In addition to teaching immigration, refugee, and international human rights law, she directed clinics assisting refugees with submission of asylum requests, before the US court of appeals and in major class action litigation. She then founded and directed the law school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic.  Patty also taught at Columbia University Law School and was the Interim Director of the Cardozo Law School’s human rights institute and clinic. Patty is a Senior Research Fellow at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. 

For more than two decades, in conjunction with the Center for Justice and Accountability and the Guernica Center for International Justice, Patty litigated a series of successful lawsuits to establish legal culpability for high-ranking Salvadoran military officials for the Salvadoran state terror of the 1980’s and the Chilean dictatorship of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Patty also was a consultant to many independent non-governmental organizations, foundations and news outlets, including the New York Times, the International Center for Transitional Justice, the National Security Archives, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Open Society Foundation. Patty is the co-author of a recent book based on her parents’ World War II correspondence.

Ralph Steinhardt (B.A. Bowdoin, J.D. Harvard) is the Lobingier Professor Emeritus of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence at the George Washington University Law School and co-founder of the Joint Programme in International Human Rights Law, with the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford. Professor Steinhardt’s scholarship spans international law, human rights, and the philosophy of law, and has been published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, as well as the American Journal of International Law, and the international law journals at Harvard and Yale. He is an award-winning litigator, with a sustained pro bono record of representing survivors of torture and other human rights violations, as well as various human rights organizations, before all levels of the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court of the United States. He has also served on numerous occasions as an expert witness in a variety of cases involving the civil liability of multinational corporations for their alleged complicity in human rights violations. Professor Steinhardt was the Founding Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Center for Justice and Accountability, an anti-impunity organization that specializes in the domestic litigation of international law in U.S. courts.

Professor Christine Chinkin, FBA, CMG, previously Professor of International Law, is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Women Peace and Security at LSE and Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan. She is co-author of The Boundaries of International Law: a Feminist Analysis (2000), The Making of International Law (2007), International Law and New Wars (2017), Gendered Peace through International Law (2024) and of Women, Peace and Security and International Law (2022), as well as numerous articles on international law, human rights, especially the human rights of women and girls. She was an original member of the faculty of the Summer School in 1995 where she taught the general curse and Women's Human Rights. 

Shreya Atrey is an Associate Professor in International Human Rights Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and is based at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. She is an associate member of the Oxford Human Rights Hub, an Official Fellow and Racial Justice and Equality Fellow at Kellogg College, and a Senior Teaching Fellow at New College. Shreya is the Editor of the Human Rights Law Review (OUP). Previously, she was based at the University of Bristol Law School and has been a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, and a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at the NYU School of Law, New York. She completed BCL with distinction and DPhil in Law on the Rhodes Scholarship from Magdalen College, University of Oxford.

Shreya works on equality and human rights issues in comparative and international law. Her first monograph, Intersectional Discrimination (OUP 2019) won the runner-up Peter Birks Book Prize in 2020. The monograph presents an account of intersectionality theory in comparative discrimination law and has been cited by the South African Constitutional Court in their path-breaking decision: Mahlangu v Minister of Labour and Others [2020] ZACC 24 (19 November 2020), which recognised the right of Black female domestic workers to access compensation for workplace injury; and the Supreme Court of India which relied on her framework of ‘intersectional integrity’ for understanding and redressing sexual violence against women in their landmark decision: Patan Jamal Vali v State of Andhra PradeshCriminal Appeal No 452 of 2021 (27 April 2021).