Christof Heyns Memorial Lecture - International Human Rights Law in a Fractured World: Contemporary Challenges to the Authority and Legitimacy of International Human Rights Law

The 'Christof Heyns Memorial Lecture' is presented annually in memory of the manifold contributions of the late Professor Christof Heyns to human rights, as lawyer, advocate, activist and educator, but also down-to-earth family man, friend and colleague. Christof Heyns was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions from 2010 to 2016; and was a member of the UN Human Rights Committee from 2017 to 2020. He served as the Dean of the Faculty of Law,  University of Pretoria, and as Director of its Centre for Human Rights. Christof passed away on 28 March 2021. In 2025, the third Lecture will be presented at the University of Oxford, where Christof was a long-serving tutor on the Master’s programme in International Human Rights Law and served as an inaugural member of the Advisory Council of the Bonavero Institute from its establishment to his untimely death.

Kate O'Regan is the inaugural Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a former judge of the South African Constitutional Court (1994 – 2009). In the mid-1980s she practiced as a lawyer in Johannesburg in a variety of fields, but especially labour law and land law, representing many of the emerging trade unions and their members, as well as communities threatened with eviction under apartheid land laws.  In 1990, she joined the Faculty of Law at UCT where she taught a range of courses including race, gender and the law, labour law, civil procedure and evidence. Since her fifteen-year term at the South African Constitutional Court ended in 2009,  she has amongst other things served as an ad hoc judge of the Supreme Court of Namibia (from 2010 - 2016), Chairperson of the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry into allegations of police inefficiency and a breakdown in trust between the police and the community of Khayelitsha (2012 – 2014), and as a member of the boards or advisory bodies of many NGOs working in the fields of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and equality.

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. 

Professor Yuval Shany is the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in International Law and former Dean of the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, and a Visiting Professor in the Center for Transnational Legal Studies (CTLS) at King’s College, London and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He was a member of the UN Human Rights Committee between 2013-2020 (chairing the Committee between 2018-2019). His current research focuses on international human rights law and new technology and he leads a European Research Council group or researchers investigating the three generation of digital human rights (3GDR). Shany is an honorary fellow of the Senior Common Room at Magdalen College (2023-2024) and an inaugural Accelerator Fellow at the Ethics in AI Institute in Oxford.

Dino Kritsiotis is Professor of Public International Law and Director of the Nottingham International Law and Security Centre at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in general international law, the history and theory of international law, as well as the law on the use of force and armed conflict. Professor Kritsiotis is the co-editor of Conceptual and Contextual Perspectives on the Modern Law of Treaties (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and, together with Professor Eyal Benvenisti of the University of Cambridge, he is editing the twelfth volume of the Cambridge History of International Law (which will appear with Cambridge University Press next year). He has held various visiting positions, including at the University of Melbourne, the University of Auckland and the University of Michigan, and, most recently, he has served as the Ariel F. Sallows Chair in Human Rights at the University of Saskatchewan (2025).