Human Rights Law Course 2020 Faculty

Kate Grady is a Senior Lecturer in Law and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law at SOAS University of London. Her interests lie in the fields of military law, domestic and international criminal law, the law of armed conflict, international peace and security, criminology, critical geography, legal history, and critical legal theories. Kate’s research has been published in journals including the Modern Law Review and the Criminal Law Review and she is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press. Kate is an advisor to the Global Legal Action Network and a laureate of the 2018 Annual Junior Faculty Forum in International Law. In 2016 she was a visiting scholar at the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law at Melbourne Law School and in 2019 a visiting fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Sara Kendall is co-director of the Centre for Critical International Law at the University of Kent, where she is Senior Lecturer in International Law. Her research interests include international criminal law, international humanitarian law, human rights, and the history and anthropology of humanitarianism. She has published widely on the work of the International Criminal Court and on the international legal dimensions of topics such as lethal autonomous weapons systems, targeted killing, and changing conceptions of territory with the 'unwilling and unable' doctrine. She co-edited Contested Justice: the Politics and Practice of International Criminal Court Interventions (Cambridge, 2015), and she recently co-convened  a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council network on the theme of 'legal materiality'. She has taught previously at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, and the University of California at Berkeley. She serves as a general editor at the Leiden Journal of International Law and on the editorial board of Humanity.

Itamar Mann is an associate professor at the University of Haifa, Faculty of Law. He is a human rights lawyer and a legal scholar, and has in recent years focused primarily on legal, political and philosophical questions concerning refugees and migration. Itamar’s book, Humanity at Sea: Maritime Migration and the Foundations of International Law, came out with Cambridge University Press in 2016. His articles have appeared e.g. in the European Journal of International Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Harvard International Law Journal, and the Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence. He is a legal adviser at the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), where he engages in strategic litigation concerning border violence, and is a board member at the Public Committee Against Torture, and at Humanity Crew. Before moving to Haifa he taught at Georgetown University Law Center, at the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies in London, and at the Volksbühne Theatre’s ‘school of disobedience’. 

Paul Seils leads the Peace Practice and Innovation Unit at the European Institute of Peace (EIP) in Brussels. He is a lawyer by profession. For more than 25 years he has worked in conflict and post-conflict situations around the world, working with victims, governments and international organizations, focusing on the relationship between sustainable peace and justice.While living in Scotland he was first a criminal defence lawyer and then went on to be the Legal Director of the Scottish Refugee Council. He left to live and work in Guatemala for 5 years after the end of the civil war there, designing and leading an investigation into the state’s genocide of Mayan groups in the 1980s. This proved a central element in the eventual prosecution of former military dictator, Rios Montt. He has served, among other things, as the Head of Situation Analysis at the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC, the Chief of the Rule of Law and Democracy Unit at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, and Vice President of the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York from 2011-2017. He has written on human rights and justice widely over the last two decades. He taught on the advanced Masters course at Leiden University from 2015-2017. He is currently Visiting Professor on Peace and Conflict with the School of International Relations at St Andrew’s University. His primary focus today is on rights-based dividends in peace processes, and how practical, rights-based ideas of reconciliation can support peace processes in the short and medium term. As part of EIP’s innovative Conflict Justice and Reconciliation programme, he leads an initiative that aims to empower the voice of Syrian refugees and IDPs in the context of resolution efforts. 

Orly Stern is a researcher, consultant and lawyer, focusing on armed conflict, gender and law. Orly has worked and researched in countries including; Somalia, Iraq, northern Nigeria, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Jordan, Uganda and South Africa. She had consulted for various international organizations, research institutions and NGOs, and has published extensively in her field, including books, book chapters, reports and articles. Orly holds a PhD in international humanitarian law from the London School of Economics and a Masters in international human rights law from Harvard Law School. She has held a senior fellowship with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and has taught international criminal law at the University of Cape Town.

Elizabeth Stubbins Bates is a Junior Research Fellow in Law at Merton College, Oxford, an Early Career Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, and a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC). Her research is at the intersection of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL); the prevention, investigation and prosecution of violations of international law in armed conflict. She is establishing the Oxford Forum for International Humanitarian Law Compliance. Dr Stubbins Bates’s research has been published by the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the International Review of the Red Cross, the European Journal of International Law, International Legal Materials, and Oxford University Press. She has taught international law and human rights at SOAS, University of London and at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); and was the first David Davies of Llandinam Research Fellow at the LSE Department of International Relations. She was a legal adviser to a number of human rights non-governmental organisations, including Amnesty International. Dr Stubbins Bates holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, and a BA in Jurisprudence from Oxford.