Kirsty is the head of the Doughty Street's International Human Rights Team and part of the Doughty Street Equalities Team. 

 

Kirsty specialises in international human rights, criminal law, public international, constitutional and international criminal law. She is instructed in the most serious, complex and prominent cases nationally and internationally. Kirsty is an experienced trial barrister. She has defended defendants and acted for Claimants as a junior and then as Queen’s Counsel before the Criminal and Civil courts respectively, in England and Wales, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, Courts Martial and Courts of Appeal in the Caribbean, the Court of Appeal in the British Virgin Islands, the European Court of Human Rights and the High Court in Gibraltar. Kirsty frequently advises before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the ECOWAS court in Abuja Nigeria, the Court of Appeal of Nigeria, the Superior Tribunal of Santander Colombia, the Supreme Court and Constitutional Courts of Colombia and the UN judicial processes and International Criminal Court.

Mark Gibney is the Belk Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.  From 2014-2016 he served as the inaugural Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Faculty of Law, Lund University and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute.  Gibney is one of the founding members of the Extraterritorial Obligations (ETO) Consortium and he serves on the Board of Editors of Human Rights Quarterly, the Journal of Human Rights and the International Studies Journal (Iran).  Since 1984, Gibney has directed the Political Terror Scale (PTS) (PoliticalTerrorScale.org), which measures levels of physical integrity violations in more than 190 states and this work has recently been expanded to include the Societal Violence Scale (SVS), which provides a comparative analysis of human rights violations by non-state actors.  His recent book publications include: International Human Rights Law:  Returning to Universal Principles (2015, 2d ed.); Litigating Transnational Human Rights Obligations: Alternative Judgments (2014), the Handbook of Human Rights (2014), and Watching Human Rights: The 101 Best Films (2013).

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Kevin Jon Heller is Professor of Criminal Law at SOAS, University of London. Until 2014, he was Associate Professor & Reader at Melbourne Law School, where he also served as Project Director for International Criminal Law at the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law, a joint project of Melbourne Law School and the Australian Defence Force.  He holds a PhD in law from Leiden University, a JD with distinction from Stanford Law School, an MA with honours in literature from Duke University, and an MA and BA in sociology, both with honours, from the New School for Social Research.

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Kevin’s academic writing has appeared in a variety of journals, including the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the Harvard International Law Journal, the Michigan Law Review, the Leiden Journal of International Law, the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Criminal Law Forum, and the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review.  His books include The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 2011); The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials (Oxford University Press, 2013) (edited with Gerry Simpson); and The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (Stanford University Press, 2011) (edited with Markus Dubber).  He is currently writing a book entitled A Geneology of International Criminal Law, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2015. For the past eight years, Kevin has also been a permanent member of the international-law blog Opinio Juris.

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On the practical side, Kevin has been involved in the International Criminal Court’s negotiations over the crime of aggression, served as Human Rights Watch’s external legal advisor on the trial of Saddam Hussein, and served from December 2008 until February 2011 as one of Radovan Karadzic's formally-appointed legal associates. He consults regularly with a variety of UN organisations (such as the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan — UNAMA) and human rights groups (such as Gisha and Human Rights First) and is a core trainer for Professionals in Humanitarian Assistance and Protection, a Brussels-based NGO that conducts IHL trainings in various locations around the world.

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Professor Obiora Chinedu Okafor is Professor Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada. Before, he held faculty positions at the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus, Nigeria, and at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He has served as an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program; a Canada-US Fulbright Scholar at MIT; a Visiting Professor at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France; a Visiting Professor at the St. Augustine International University, Kampala, Uganda; and as the Gani Fawehinmi Distinguished Chair of Human Rights Law at the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

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Professor Okafor has published extensively in the fields of international human rights law and immigration/refugee law, as well as general public international law (especially with regard to third world approaches to international law). He is the author of The African Human Rights System, Activist Forces, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Legitimizing Human Rights NGOs: Lessons from Nigeria (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2006); and Re-Defining Legitimate Statehood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2000). He has co-edited three books: Legitimate Governance in Africa: International and Domestic Legal Perspectives (The Hague: Kluwer, 1999); Humanizing Our Global Order: Essays in Honour of Ivan Head(University of Toronto Press, 2003); and The Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2003). He has edited three special journal issues, and published over seventy (70) journal articles, book chapters and other scholarly writings. He is the Editor of the Transnational Human Rights Review, and sits on the editorial advisory board of a number of scholarly periodicals. He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded partnership development research and dissemination project relating to Canadian/Nigerian human rights engagements; and on a project examining the comparative character of refugee rights in Canada and the USA post 9/11. He is also due to begin a large multi-year study on Canada’s Human Rights Role in Africa (CARRIA); as well as a smaller study of the role of critical third world international law scholars in socio-economic and political praxis under the auspices of the emergent, Osgoode-anchored, Research Network on International Law in the Global South (RENILIGS).

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Professor Okafor is currently the Chairperson of the United Nations Human Rights Council Advisory Committee, a Geneva-based committee of experts elected by the Human Rights Council to serve as its think tank and principal subsidiary organ. He has also served as an expert panelist for the United Nations Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee and United Nations Working Group on People of African Descent. And he has worked as a consultant or adviser for several international organizations, government agencies, parliaments, and law firms.

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Gerry Simpson is Professor of Public International Law at the LSE since January 2016. He previously taught at the University of Melbourne (2007-2015), the Australian National University (1995-1998) and LSE (2000-2007).

 

He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004) and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity 2007), and co-editor (with Kevin Jon Heller) of Hidden Histories (Oxford, 2014) and (with Raimond Gaita) of Who’s Afraid of International Law? (Monash, forthcoming, 2016) 

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Dr Hannah Tonkin is an experienced international lawyer specialising in international humanitarian law and policy, international human rights law and international criminal law. She is currently working at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York, where she advises on international humanitarian law and policy with a view to ensuring the effective delivery of humanitarian assistance by UN agencies and NGOs working in crisis zones around the world.

Before joining OCHA in 2014, Hannah worked for several years as a lawyer at various international courts and tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. This work, both for the Prosecution and in Chambers, involved complex legal research, drafting procedural and substantive motions and decisions, and attending court hearings and judicial deliberations.

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In 2011, Hannah worked as a legal adviser to the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, based in Manama, Bahrain. The Commission was tasked with determining whether the events that took place in Bahrain in 2011, in connection with the Arab Spring, violated international human rights law and norms, and to make recommendations aimed at preventing future such violations.

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Hannah is dual qualified in Australia (New South Wales) and in England and Wales.

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John Wadham was until recently the Executive Director of INTERIGHTS (the Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights).  For six years he was General Counsel for the Equality and Human Rights Commission and for four years the Deputy Chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. 

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Between 1995 and 2003 he was the Director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties). He also worked for several law centres in South London and in private practice.  He is a solicitor and studied at the College of Law, Surrey University and the London School of Economics.  He is a Visiting Fellow at Bristol University; a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and a Honorary Lecturer at University of Leicester.  He is a co-author of the Blackstone’s Guide to the Human Rights Act (OUP), the Blackstone’s Guide to the Freedom of Information Act (OUP), the Blackstone’s Guide to the Equality Act (OUP) and many other articles and publications.

 

Currently he is acting as a freelance human rights expert and equality for the Council of Europe and on its behalf in Albania, Moldova and Ukraine.  In the UK he is providing strategic and legal advice on all the recent proposals for the repeal of the Human Rights Act, withdrawing from the European Convention of Human Rights and the creation of a British Bill of Rights. 

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Peer Zumbansen is the inaugural Professor of Transnational Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London. He is the Director of the Transnational Law Institute. 

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Admitted to the bar in Germany, he studied philosophy and law in Germany and France before receiving an LLM from Harvard Law School, followed by a doctorate and the post-doctoral, Habilitation from Frankfurt’s Goethe University. At Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, he held a prestigious Canada Research Chair for a decade – first in the Comparative and Transnational Law of Corporate Governance and, since 2009, in Transnational Economic Governance and Legal Theory. He was also the founder of the interdisciplinary Critical Research Laboratory in Law & Society and has consistently contributed to domestic and international debates on legal education.  In the summer of 2013, he was the inaugural Chair in Global Law at Tilburg Law School in The Netherlands and, in the fall of 2013, a Senior Research Scholar at Michigan Law School. At Osgoode, he was the founding director of the Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy Network (CLPE) and the Collaborative Urban Research Laboratory, two international and interdisciplinary research centres. He was, from 2000-2013, the founding co-editor in chief of the German Law Journal and has been, since 2012, the editor in chief of Transnational Legal Theory.

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Rob Cryer was a Professor of International and Criminal Law at Birminham Law School, University of Birmingham. His expertise was in international and criminal law. He lectured and spoke widely at both national and international level, primarily on international criminal law and public international law more generally.