Members

Directorship

Nandini Ramanujam – Co-Director & Director of Human Rights Programs (web page)

Professor Nandini Ramanujam. Photo by Lysanne Larose
Professor Nandini Ramanujam is the Co-Director and Director of Programs of the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism at McGill University's Faculty of Law. She also directs the International Human Rights Internship Program. She is the McGill representative for the Scholars at Risk Network and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Scholars at Risk Network, Canada section.

Nandini Ramanujam’s research and teaching interests include Law and Development, Institutions and Governance, Economic Justice, Food Security and Food Safety. She is also interested in the role of civil society and the Fourth Estate (Media) in promotion of the rule of law, as well as the exploration of interconnections between field based human rights work and theoretical discourses. She also has extensive experience in human rights issues, strategic planning, governance and programming, with a particular focus on education and civil society.

She was named co-director of the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in 2021.

Frédéric Mégret – Co-Director (web page)

Professor Frédéric Mégret. Photo by Lysanne Larose.
Frédéric Mégret is a Professor of Law and a William Dawson Scholar at McGill University. He held the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism from 2006 to 2015.

Professor Mégret is currently co-authoring a book on Diasporas and International Law with Larissa van den Herik (Leiden University). He is the co-editor with Philip Alston of The United Nations and Human Rights: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2020); with Immi Tallgren of The Dawn of a Discipline: International Criminal Justice and its Early Exponents (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and, with Kevin Jon Heller, Sarah Nouwen, Jens David Ohlin and Darryl Robinson of The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 2020). His research interests include international human rights law, legal pluralism, the laws of war, international criminal law, public international law, international legal theory and international relations.

He was named co-director of the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in 2021.

Current Centre Coordinator

Leena Jamila Morowa

 

Former Centre Coordinator

Sharon Webb

Sharon Webb
Sharon was recognized as an Unsung Hero of McGill in 2022:

"Sharon Webb has been with the Faculty of Law since 2012, and works tirelessly to coordinate events of the two centres for which she acts as Programs Coordinator. According to her nominators, “her diligence, attention to detail, efficiency, calm demeanor and kindness” are the reasons she deserves mention as one of our Faculty’s Unsung Heroes. Her nominators also point out that her innovative, creative and energetic approach to her work makes her a delight to work with. One nominator stated that, “she has a particular gift for making the impossible possible by finding creative and accessible solutions”. In addition to being an excellent employee, Sharon is also incredibly institutionally minded and exceptionally professional. She always goes above and beyond not only in executing her own tasks but also in helping others, resulting in her being known as the “go-to” person. Sharon is also extremely humble and not fond of the spotlight. Her inspiring and exemplary service make her an Unsung Hero.

Nominated by members of faculty and alumni from the Faculty of Law."

Full members

Kirsten Anker – McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Kirsten Anker
Kirsten Anker joins the Law Faculty in 2006 as Assistant Professor and was a Boulton Fellow at McGill in 2004. She teaches in the areas of property and Indigenous peoples and the law, and is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Sydney, Australia on legal pluralism in the context of the recognition of native title in Australia. Generally she is interested in studying law as a lived human practice, and has written about anthropological and social-scientific approaches to law, aesthetics in proof of native title, and the intersection of normative orders in colonial states. At McGill she is principal researcher in a project funded by Justice Canada investigating the inclusion of Aboriginal legal traditions in Transsystemic Legal Education.

Mark Antaki – McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Mark Antaki

Professor Mark Antaki teaches several courses related to ethics and human plurality. He has a doctorate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley where he completed a thesis undertaking 'A Genealogy of Crimes Against Humanity'. The thesis traced the historical transformations that made the naming of crimes against humanity possible (e.g. the trial of Louis XVI and the transformation of tyranny into a crime against humanity, the thought of Rousseau and the transformation of the laws of war into humanitarian law). Professor Antaki is interested in the philosophical commitments as well as in the understandings of law and politics that come along with the transformation of "humanity" into a legal and political category.

Adelle Blackett – McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Adelle Blackett
Professor Blackett is a William Dawson Scholar with expertise in labour law, trade law, and international development. A former official of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland, Prof. Blackett has also been a visiting academic at the African Development Bank in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

She holds a doctorate in law from Columbia University where she taught as an Associate in Law for two years. She is a research coordinator for the Inter-university Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT), the convener of the Labour Law and Development Research Network (LLDRN) and the recent recipient of a Canadian Foundation for Innovation award to construct a Labour Law and Development Research Laboratory (LLDRL).

Professor Blackett's current community service includes an advisory role to the ILO on standard setting for decent work for domestic workers (2008-2011) and membership in the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse du Québec (2009-2014 appointment).

Ongoing research projects include rethinking the relationship between trade regulation and labour law from a distributive justice perspective, examining the role of international persuasion in labour law reform in West Africa, and identifying regulatory vehicles to promote the citizenship at work of domestic workers.

Megan Bradley - McGill Department of Political science / Institute for the Study of International Development (web page)

Megan Bradley

Megan Bradley is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Development Studies at McGill University. Her research focuses on the rights and wellbeing of refugees and internally displaced persons, as well as on questions of transitional justice, reconciliation, and accountability for human rights violations. She holds a doctorate in International Relations from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and is the author of Refugee Repatriation: Justice, Responsibility and Redress (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In late 2015, Megan published a book entitled Forced Migration, Reconciliation and Justice with MQUP which explores the harsh reality that more people were displaced globally in early 2015 by conflict and human rights violations than at any time since the Second World War.

Professor Bradley is a Non-Resident Fellow with the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC where she is affiliated with the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, and has also worked with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Development Research Centre. From 2007-2008, she served as a Cadieux-Léger Fellow with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. She has conducted fieldwork in countries including Haiti, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, and is undertaking a SSHRC-funded study on the right of return.

Angela Campbell – McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Angela Campbell
Professor Angela Campbell has studied issues of human rights and legal pluralism in the contexts of Family Law, Health Law and Criminal Law. Her current projects include a study (funded by the SSHRC and the Borden, Ladner Gervais Fellowship) of how legal approaches to polygamous marriages in Canada compare with appreciations of law, rules, tradition and expectations within polygamous families.

In another project (funded by la Fondation du Barreau du Québec), she explores how Quebec family courts treat the matter of parental drug and alcohol dependence in cases pertaining to child custody and access. This project examines the specific question of whether addiction can and should be treated as a "disability" in juridical analyses concerning children's best interests. Other recent projects focus on the effects generated "on the ground" for social workers of child welfare legislation (this study is funded by Valorisation Recherche Québec), and on cultural and familial norms and expectations that shape individual choices that can ultimately affect health outcomes.

Sarah Riley Case - McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Sarah Riley Case
Sarah Riley Case is a Boulton Junior Fellow and an incoming Assistant Professor (August 2022) whose research and teaching focus on slavery and the law, Critical Race Theory, Black life, ‘Third World’ approaches to international law, settler colonialism, and governing the natural world. In 2021-2022, she is serving as a Liaison to the Assistant Dean (Inclusion - Black and Indigenous Flourishing).

Before joining McGill, she was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy. She served as a Special Advisor to the UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and International Solidarity. She taught as well at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and at Osgoode Hall Law School.

Sarah Riley Case’s work crosses over law, history, conceptions of justice, and the arts. Her recent publications include ‘Homelands of Mary Ann Shadd’, in which she explores the Black radical tradition, historical erasure, and the ‘politics of recognition’ in international law’s narratives (in Immi Tallgren, ed., Portraits of International Law New Names and Forgotten Faces?). Another recent publication, ‘Thoughts of Liberation’ in Canadian Art (with Nataleah Hunter-Young), puts ten Black women poets, scholars, artists, and activists in conversation. Her book chapter, ‘Redressing Historical Responsibility for the Precarities of Climate Change in the Present’ (with Julia Dehm) undertakes an immanent critique of international law to argue that climate change results from histories of dispossession and, as such, full repair for this problem demands radical change through reparations for states in the Global South, people living in poverty, and Black and Indigenous and other marginalized peoples in settler colonial states.

She is currently writing a manuscript on how peoples of Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and Latin America sought to address the novel problem of climate change during the ‘decolonization era’ by matching a representation of nature (as a commons) with their aspirations to refashion international law through solidarity. She explores the ways in which law developed, focusing on its progress narratives and its reproduction of subjugation.

Sarah Riley Case collaborates with people working toward racial and regional justice in the UN system, academic communities, and legal clinics. She presently serves on the Black Legal Action Centre (BLAC) Task Force on Legal Aid Ontario Modernization, the executive of the Black Canadian Studies Association, and the editorial board of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. She has received awards and honours from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, SSHRC, Transnational Environmental Law journal, and the American Society of International Law, among others.

Miriam Cohen - Faculté de droit, University of Montreal (web page)

Miriam Cohen

Miriam Cohen is an Associate Professor and holds the Canada Research Chair on International Justice and Human Rights at University of Montreal’s Faculty of Law, where she teaches and researches in international, public and human rights law. She is also a researcher at the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP), the Centre international de criminologie comparée (CICC) and the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CÉRIUM).

At the Faculty of Law, she leads a program based on two main axes: international justice and reparation for human rights violations (Axis 1); and the interplay between human rights, new technologies and the empowerment of individuals and communities (Axis 2). She is also the founder of the International Justice and Fundamental Rights Laboratory, where she supervises interdisciplinary research teams developing a specialized technological platform for the analysis of fundamental rights jurisprudence. The project, developed in partnership with the Centre d'expertise numérique en recherche (CEN-R) of the University of Montreal, received a research infrastructure grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) through the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, and a second grant from the Government of Quebec for the creation of the digital research infrastructure, for a total of nearly $400,000 (phase 1). 

Before her academic career, Professor Cohen gained extensive experience with international organizations. She worked in the legal department at the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) and previously at the Appeals Chamber and Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). She has also served as a Harvard Law School researcher, as rapporteur for a committee of experts on a draft convention on crimes against humanity, and as a member of a delegation to UN treaty negotiation in Geneva. As legal counsel (international law expert), she acted for the Republic of Panama before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Hamburg). As a member of the Quebec Bar, she has worked in a major law firm in Montreal and offered her expertise in pro bono cases.

Recipient of several awards, fellowships and grants, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Bar Association (Law for the Future Fund) and the Legal Research Foundation, she works with several interdisciplinary and international research teams, and her research has been published in law journals and textbooks in Canada, the United States, Europe, South Korea and Brazil (her home country). She is the author of Realizing Reparative Justice for International Crimes: from Theory to Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-author of the third edition of the Précis de droit international public with Professor Stéphane Beaulac (LexisNexis, 2021).

International law networks regularly seek Professor Cohen as a consultant and trainer. In addition, she is a rapporteur for the Oxford University Press project on international organizations and a member of the boards of the Canadian Council on International Law and the Quebec Society of International Law. Before joining the University of Montreal, she was an Assistant Professor of Law at Lakehead University (Ontario), where she lectured on international law and Canadian domestic public law from 2015 to 2018. Professor Cohen is originally from Brazil and she works in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French, and has basic knowledge of Italian and Dutch.

François Crépeau - McGill Faculty of Law  (web page)

François Crépeau

François Crépeau, O.C., F.R.S.C., Ad.E., is a Full Professor and the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law at the Faculty of Law of McGill University. He was the Director of the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism from 2015 to 2020.

Professor Crépeau is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Agency for Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the Chair of the Thematic Working Group: Migrant Rights and Integrations in Host Communities, KNOMAD - Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, World Bank Group, Washington, DC, and a member of the Advisory Committee of the International Migration Initiative of the Open Society Foundations (NY). He is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Bureau for Children’s Rights (Montreal).

He was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants from 2011 to 2017. In this capacity, he conducted official visits to Albania, Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Malta, the European institutions in Brussels and Vienna, Angola, Australia and Nauru. He has also produced several thematic reports: the detention of migrants, the protection of migrants’ rights at the external borders of the European Union, climate change and migration, global migration governance, labour exploitation of migrants, labour recruitment practices, trade agreements and migration. He was the Chair of the Coordination Committee of the United Nations Human Rights Procedures (2014-2015).

Allison Christians - McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Allison Christians

Allison Christians holds the Stikeman Chair in the Law of Taxation at the McGill University Faculty of Law. Her research and teaching focus on national and international tax law and policy issues, with emphasis on the relationship between taxation and economic development and on the role of government and non-government institutions and actors in the creation of tax policy norms.

She has written numerous scholarly articles, essays, and book chapters, as well as editorials, columns, and articles in professional journals, addressing national and international tax law and policy issues.

Irwin Cotler, P.C., O.C., O.Q.

Irwin Cotler

The Honourable Irwin Cotler is the Founder- Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, longtime Member of Parliament, international human rights lawyer, counsel to prisoner of conscience, and Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University

He is the recipient of fourteen honorary doctorates, where he has been recognized as “a scholar and advocate of international stature” (as cited in his various honorary doctorates). He has been named an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the National Order of Quebec, and is the recipient also of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

An international human rights lawyer, Professor Cotler has served as Counsel to prisoners of conscience from all over the world including Nelson Mandela (South Africa), Liu Xiaobo (China), Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky (former Soviet Union), Jacobo Timmerman (Argentina), Professor Saad Edin Ibrahim (Egypt), Leopoldo López (Venezuela), and Nasrin Sotoudeh (Iran).  For his work representing political prisoners, he was characterized as “counsel for the oppressed” by Canada’s national magazine, Macleans, and “freedom’s counsel” by the Oslo Freedom Forum.

Myriam Denov - McGill School of Social Work (web page)

Myriam Denov
Myriam Denov is a Full Professor and holds the Canada Research Chair in Youth, Gender and Armed Conflict (Tier 1).  Her research and teaching interests lie in the areas of children and youth in adversity, and international child protection, with an emphasis on war and political violence, children in armed conflict, and gender-based violence. A specialist in participatory research, she has worked with war-affected children in Asia, Africa, and the Americas and has conducted research on the reintegration experiences of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Colombia, and war-affected youth living in Canada.  Denov has presented expert evidence in court on child soldiers, and has advised government and nongovernmental organizations on children in armed conflict, and girls in armed groups.  She currently leads a multi-institutional and multidisciplinary research team on children and global adversity.  Denov has authored five books, including Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (Cambridge University Press) and Children’s Rights and International Development: Lessons and Challenges from the Field (Palgrave Macmillan).   In 2014, she was awarded a Trudeau Fellowship to address the realities of children born of wartime sexual violence in Northern Uganda.  Denov holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar.

Bernard Duhaime - Département des sciences juridiques, UQÀM (web page)

Bernard Duhaime
Bernard Duhaime is Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQÀM, Montreal, Canada), where he teaches mainly international human rights law and specializes on the Inter-American System of Protection of Human Rights. He also serves as a Member and President- Rapporteur of the Working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances reporting to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Bernard Duhaime is a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation (2017-2021). Pr Duhaime contributes to the defense and promotion of human rights since 1996. He has worked or collaborated with several international and national human rights agencies, advised many human rights and indigenous peoples’ organizations, and human rights defenders, as well as international organizations and States. He regularly represents or assists victims and human rights defenders in contentious cases before international institutions. He founded the Clinique Internationale de Défense des Droits Humains de l’UQAM and was its first director. Pr Duhaime has authored more than fifty publications and presented more than one hundred communications worldwide. In Quebec, Pr Duhaime is a member of various research centers such as the Centre d’Étude sur le Droit International et la Mondialisation (UQAM) and the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la diversité au Québec (UQAM) and the Centre d’Études Interaméricaines (Laval University).

Pearl Eliadis - McGill Faculty of Law / McGill Max Bell School of Public Policy (web page)

Pearl Eliadis
Pearl Eliadis is a human rights lawyer in private practice in Montreal. She has successfully led complex, global projects dealing with national human rights institutions, capacity assessment, and women’s rights, and has worked in China, Nepal, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan and Timor Leste. With more than twenty years’ experience in human rights law and public policy, Pearl has been retained by human rights institutions, NGOs, the United Nations, and the European Commission. She is president of the Quebec Bar Association's Human Rights Committee, past president of Equitas, and extensively involved in civil society organizations.  She received her law degrees at McGill and Oxford, and has received the Canada 125 Commemorative medal, the 2006 Woman of Distinction award, and the 2013 Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Award.

She has published books and articles on human rights and public administration and is on the Editorial Board of PKI's Global Justice Journal. She is an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Law at McGill and her book on Canada's human rights commissions and tribunals, Speaking out on Human Rights: Debating Canada's Human Rights System, was published by McGill-Queens University Press (2014) and won the 2015 Huguenot Society of Canada award.

Omar Farahat - McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Omar Farahat
Omar Farahat is an Assistant Professor at McGill University, Faculty of Law. His areas of interest include classical Islamic law, legal theory, theology, and ethics. His current research focuses on the concepts of time, generality, and personhood, and the intersection of legal and moral theories in classical Islamic thought.

Farahat’s first book, The Foundation of Norms in Islamic Jurisprudence and Theology (CUP, 2019) presents a new way of understanding the work of classical Islamic theologians and legal theorists who maintained that divine revelation is necessary for the knowledge of the norms and values of human actions. Through a reconstruction of classical Ashʿarī-Muʿtazilī debates on the nature and implications of divine speech, Farahat argues that the Ashʿarī attachment to revelation was not a purely traditionalist position, but a rational philosophical commitment emerging from debates in epistemology and theology.

Farahat’s research on Islamic legal theory and ethics has also appeared in the Journal of Law and Religion, the Journal of Religious Ethics, and Oriens. Before to joining McGill, he completed his PhD.at Columbia University, after which he spent a year as a Research Fellow at Yale Law School. Prior to that, he obtained a dual law degree from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Cairo University, an LLM from Harvard Law School, and an interdisciplinary MA in the humanities from New York University.

Evan Fox-Decent - McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Evan Fox-Decent (by Lysanne Larose)
Evan Fox-Decent teaches and publishes in legal theory, political theory, private law, public law, and international law. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Cosmopolitan Law and Justice. He is currently working on a SSHRC-supported project, The Cosmopolitan Justice of International Law.

He is the author of Sovereignty’s Promise: The State as Fiduciary (OUP, 2012) and Fiduciaries of Humanity: How International Law Constitutes Authority (with Evan J. Criddle, OUP 2016), and co-editor of Fiduciary Government (CUP, 2018).

Evan Fox-Decent has worked on human rights and democratic governance reform in Latin America since 1987, beginning with advocacy and relief work in El Salvador under the auspices of Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Medardo Gomez. He has also served with the UN Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA 1996-99), and has consulted on behalf of numerous development and research agencies, as well as on behalf of legal institutions in Latin America, including the Supreme Court of Venezuela, the World Bank, the International Development Bank, USAID, and Canada’s International Development Research Centre. 

Jane Glenn – McGill Faculty of Law 

Jane Glenn

Jane Glenn is an Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Law, and has a joint appointment in the School of Urban Planning and a cross appointment in the McGill School of Environment. She was a member of McGill University’s Institute of Comparative Law and an Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. She has held visiting positions in France, Brazil, Costa Rica, Trinidad and Mexico, and most recently was a Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (2003-2004). Professor Glenn has an ongoing interest in development issues in Caribbean basin countries, which she pursues as a member of the Groupe interuniversitaire de Montréal “Villes et développement” , an interdisciplinary group financed by the Canadian International Development Agency, with present projects in Nicaragua and Honduras. Her current research focuses on the right to housing, which she is pursuing in Trinidad, St. Lucia and Costa Rica with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and in Canada with the support of a Dobson Fellowship from the Faculty of Law.

David Howes – Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University (web page)

David Howes

David Howes is Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He has conducted field research on the cultural life of the senses in the Massim and Middle Sepik River regions of Papua New Guinea, Northwestern Argentina, and the Southwestern United States.

Professor Howes has taught several courses in the McGill Law Faculty on human rights and social diversity, as well as the Foundations of Canadian Law course. He is the editor of a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society on "Cross-Cultural Jurisprudence: Culture in the Domain of Law" (2005). Other research interests include: the globalization of the consumer society, dealt with in Cross-Cultural Consumption (Routledge, 1996); and, the sensorium as a focus for cultural studies, addressed in Empire of the Senses (Berg 2004) and Sensual Relations (Michigan, 2003). Current funded projects include research on multi-sensory marketing, following which he intends to resume his research on the constitution of the Canadian imaginary.

Sébastien Jodoin - McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Sébastien Jodoin. Photo by Lysanne Larose. [a white bald man with glasses, wearing a pale blue shirt, a navy jacket and a tie stands next to a tree]
Sébastien Jodoin is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law of McGill University, where holds a Canada Research Chair (tier 2) in Human Rights and the Environment. A former Trudeau Scholar, he is the director of the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Program. He is also an Associate Member of the Institute of Health & Social Policy, the Max Bell School of Public Policy, and the McGill School of Environment.

Sébastien Jodoin's research focuses on two broad themes: the relationship between human rights and efforts to address complex environmental problems and the study of climate legal, policy, and governance processes in a comparative and transnational perspective. Sébastien is the author of Forest Preservation in a Changing Climate: REDD+ and Indigenous and Community Rights in Indonesia and Tanzania (CUP, 2017) and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Human Rights and Climate Governance (Routledge, 2018). His scholarship has appeared in top-ranked peer reviewed journals in law and the social sciences and has been cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In his capacity as a faculty member living with multiple sclerosis, he currently serves as the co-chair for McGill University’s Joint Board-Senate Subcommittee on Persons with Disabilities. Prior to joining McGill, Sébastien worked at the United Nations and the Canadian section of Amnesty International.

Derek Jones – McGill Research Group on Health and Law

Derek J. Jones is a health lawyer, lecturer and scholar. A graduate of Harvard and Yale Universities, he works at the interface of human rights, science and ethics in the analysis of questions such as:

  • What international norms offer model privacy standards for health information? 
  • When, if ever, should human research be conducted without informed consent?
  • Does procreative liberty mandate access to reproductive health technologies?
  • To protect dignitary interests, should the law recognize bodily property rights in human cells and tissue?
  • How should human rights guide the evolving law on genetic testing?
  • How may equality and confidentiality standards reform mental health policy in our workplaces?

To help answer such questions, Derek Jones has collaborated as senior advisor to governmental, professional, university, international bodies, including Justice Canada, Health Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Law Reform Commission of Canada, and United Nations. He served on Canada’s drafting committee for the International Declaration on Human Genetic Data, and for UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. As founding Director of the Government of Canada Interagency Advisory Panel and Secretariat on Research Ethics, he also played a leading role in the recent revision of Canada’s national standards for the ethical conduct research involving humans.

At McGill, he has taught health law in bioethics, psychiatry and law, AIDS law, comparative medical law, nursing law and ethics. He is the author of studies or reports on the right to health; genetic testing and human rights; AIDS & disability discrimination; human research and international privacy laws; brain death and organ transplantation; confidentiality; tissue sales and procurement ethics; post-mortem insemination; democratic values and ethics frameworks for biotechnology.

A member of McGill’s Research Group on Health and Law, his current research projects include human rights and research ethics; mental health in the workplace; conflict of interest in health sciences; health, human rights and disability.

Alana Klein – McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Alana Klein

Alana Klein was a Boulton Fellow at the Faculty before joining it as Assistant Professor in 2008. She teaches and researches in constitutional law, human rights law, international law and criminal law and is currently completing a doctorate Columbia Law School focussing on social and economic rights and health care governance. The position of marginalized groups and individuals in decentralized and privatized systems and the role of accountability requirements in governance and decision-making are primary preoccupations in her research. Prior to joining the Faculty, she was a senior policy analyst with the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, where she worked on HIV/AIDS and immigration, legal and other barriers to harm reduction programs for people who use illegal drugs, and law reform to promote the rights of women and girls in the context of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. She has taught at Columbia Law School and Columbia University and has interned with the International Refugee Program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First) and with the Palestinian Ministry of Economy and Trade. In 2002-2003, she was a law clerk to former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour and she was appointed to the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 2006.

Matthew Lange – McGill Department of Sociology (web page)

Matthew Lange
Matthew Lange has been a professor at McGill since 2004.

His work focuses on state building, nationalism, ethnic violence, development, colonial legacies, and comparative-historical methods. In addition to his articles and chapters, he has authored Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State Power (Chicago, 2009), Educations in Ethnic Violence: Identity, Educational Bubbles, and Resource Mobilization (Cambridge, 2012), and Comparative-Historical Methods (Sage, 2013) and is a co-editor of States and Development: Historical Antecedents of Stagnation and Advance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and The Oxford Handbook of the Transformations of the State (Oxford, 2015).

He holds a PhD from Brown University.

Jacob Levy – McGill Department of Political Science (web page)

Jacob Levy
Professor Jacob Levy is the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science, and an associate member of the Department of Philosophy. He is also Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre For the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds.

His areas of interest in contemporary political theory include liberalism, multiculturalism, and nationalism, and questions involving the status and rights of intermediate groups including associations, indigenous peoples, linguistic minorities, and religious bodies. In the history of political thought, he studies mainly French, English, Scottish, and American theorists from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century, including Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville, Hume, Smith, and the American founding. In jurisprudence and philosophy of law his interests include legal pluralism, constitutional theory, federalism, and choice of law.

Catherine Lu – McGill Department of Political Science (web page)

Catherine Lu

Professor Catherine Lu teaches in the areas of political theory and international relations, and has taught courses on international political theory; global justice; and problems of post-conflict justice and reconciliation. She is the author of Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and has published articles and book chapters on themes such as cosmopolitanism as an ethical perspective, reparations after war, emotions and reconciliation after war, and the concept of political friendship in world politics. She was a faculty fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University (2004-5). Currently she is the Vice-Chair of the International Ethics Section of the International Studies Association (2008-10), and the North American Co-Convenor of the Standing Group in International Political Theory of the European Consortium for Political Research. She is working on a book manuscript on the idea of settling accounts in world politics following war, atrocity and oppression.

Marie Manikis - McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Marie Manikis

Marie Manikis teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Sentencing. Her research interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, human rights, victims, sentencing, gender theory and criminal justice.

Professor Manikis’ scholarship is interdisciplinary and uses social science methodologies, proportionality theory in sentencing, and gender perspectives to advance the available knowledge in criminal law and criminal justice. Her work has been published in Canadian and British peer-reviewed journals and was presented at several conferences and seminars, including for judicial training seminars with the National Judicial Institute (Canada), the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law, the British Association of Comparative Law, the World Society of Victimology, as well as Canadian, British and American Universities.

During her doctoral studies, she taught graduate tutorials in criminal justice at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford and was a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School. In 2008-2009, she taught tutorials on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and judicial review at York University. Prior to this, she practiced law in Montreal and clerked for a Superior Court Justice. Finally, Professor Manikis has been interested in the development of evidence-based policies and has provided consultation reports based on her research to the Department of Justice in Canada, the Ministry of Justice in England and Wales and the Canadian Senate.

Víctor Muñiz-Fraticelli – McGill Faculty of Law / Dept. of Political Science (web page)

Víctor M. Muñiz-Fraticelli
Víctor M. Muñiz-Fraticelli is Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science. He received a Juris Doctor from the University of Puerto Rico, where he also served on law review, and later clerked at the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico for the Hon. Antonio S. Negrón-García and the Hon. Federico Hernández-Denton. He earned a PhD in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago for a dissertation entitled "The Structure of Pluralism". His interests range across philosophy, politics, and law. Muñiz-Fraticelli is currently working on clarifying the idea of pluralism in meta-ethics, politics, and law, and developing a defense of the autonomy of associations and of the institutions necessary for that autonomy to flourish. He is also interested in the currents of contemporary liberal theory – with special emphasis on the work and influence of John Rawls – and on the theory of private law and its relationship to sovereignty and constitutionalism.

Vrinda Narain – McGill Faculty of Law / Centre for Research and Teaching on Women (web page)

Vrinda Narain
Vrinda Narain was a Boulton Fellow at the Faculty of Law before becoming Assistant Professor in 2008. She is a Research Associate in the Department of Afroasiatic Studies at the University of the Free State, South Africa. During the 2006-2007 academic year she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Asian Institute at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. As a lawyer, she has practiced in the areas of family law, laws relating to women, constitutional law, corporate law and administrative law. Her current research and teaching interests include constitutional law, feminist legal theory, social diversity and law, postcolonial studies and law and critical race theory.

Ronald Niezen - University of San Diego. (web page)

Ronald Niezen

Ronald Niezen is a Professor Practice at the University of San Diego where he teaches in the departments of Sociology and Political Science/International Relations. He is a former Professor of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and an Associate Member of the Faculty of Law at McGill University (2004 – 2022). He held the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the faculties of Law and of Arts between 2013 and 2020, and is a former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at McGill. He also held the Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Law between 2012 and 2019. He was selected as the William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair for Canadian Studies, Harvard University, for 2018-2019.

Professor Niezen researches and teaches in the areas of political and legal anthropology, indigenous peoples and human rights. He is an anthropologist with wide ranging research experience: with the Songhay of Mali, the Cree communities of Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba, and the Sami of northern Europe.

Professor Niezen has taught legal anthropology and anthropological theory at the Faculty of Law and the Anthropology Department of McGill University.

René Provost - McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

René Provost
Professor Provost teaches and conducts research in public international law, international human rights law, international humanitarian law, legal theory and legal anthropology. He is particularly interested in human rights, international criminal law, the law of armed conflict, and the intersection of law and culture. In September 2015, he was awarded a fellowship by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation for his research project that aims to explore the possibility of convincing armed, non-state groups to apply justice by respecting minimum standards of international humanitarian law in conflict zones.

He is the author of  International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Cambridge University Press, 2002), the editor of State Responsibility in International Law (Ashgate/Darthmout, 2002), and co-editor of Public International Law Chiefly as Applied and Interpreted in Canada (Emond Montgomery, 2006). He is also the editor of Mapping the Legal Boundaries of Belonging - Religion and Multiculturalism from Israel to Canada (OUP, 2014).

He has acted as a consultant for DFAIT and CIDA on numerous occasions, and served as the president of the Société québécoise de droit international from 2002 to 2006.

Shaheen Shariff – McGill Department of Integrated Studies, Faculty of Education (web page)

Shaheen Shariff
Dr. Shariff is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University, and international expert on cyber-bullying. Her research and teaching are grounded in the study of law as it impacts educational policy, pedagogy and practice. Specifically, her work addresses the emerging policy vacuum on parent and school responsibilities to supervise and intervene when children and teenagers engage in bullying at school and in cyber-space. Her work identifies limits on student free expression in school and cyber-space; privacy rights, cyber-safety, cyber-libel; and school supervision (in the physical school setting and on-line). She has developed guidelines for school administrators, teachers and parents regarding the extent of their legal responsibilities to address cyber-bullying in various contexts. Her work also focuses on human rights, constitutional and tort law as they inform institutional responsibilities to provide safe and productive school and work environments; censorship and diversity in schools.

Dr. Shariff has served on an international advisory committee working with UNESCO and CIDA as part of a group of consultants working with the International Institute for Educational Planning to develop a toolkit for drafting Teacher Codes of Conduct at the global level. She was also recently a panelist with the(US) First Amendment Center’s online symposium which featured her scholarship on the legal implications for educational institutions in relation to policy issues around cyber-bullying.

Colleen Sheppard - McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Colleen Sheppard. Photo by Lysanne Larose.
Professor Colleen Sheppard's teaching and research focus on human rights law, equality rights, comparative constitutional law and feminist legal theory. In addition to her teaching at McGill Professor Sheppard has been a visiting professor at Dalhousie Law School, the University of Maine, School of Law, and the Institut de droit comparé, Université Lyon III.

Colleen Sheppard served as Research Director for the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism from 2005-2009. Her recent publications include Inclusive Equality: The Relational Dimensions of Systemic Discrimination in Canada (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010) and "Reducing Group-based Inequality in a Legally Plural World", Working Paper, CRISE (Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity), Oxford University; published online, February 2010.

Beyond her teaching and research work in the domain of human rights, Professor Sheppard has been active in public service activities to promote and advance human rights in Canada and internationally. She served as a Commissioner on the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission from 1991-1996, is a board member of Equitas - International Centre for Human Rights Education, and has been a consultant with the Canadian International Development Agency, Justice Canada, the National Judicial Institute, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Ontario Métis Aboriginal Association and the International Labour Organization. Colleen was director of the CHRLP between 2010 and 2015. She was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2016.

Mirja Trilsch - Département des sciences juridiques, UQÀM (web page)

Mirja Trilsch
Mirja Trilsch is a professor at the Department of Law at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) where she teaches Constitutional Law and International Human Rights Law. Since 2011, she is also the Director of UQAM’s International Clinic for the Defence of Human Rights (Clinique internationale de défense des droits humains de l’UQAM - CIDDHU in its French acronym). The CIDDHU was founded in 2005 and, at the time, was the first clinic of its kind in the francophone world.

Mirja has directed clinical projects in collaboration with numerous Human Rights organizations around the world, such as a parallel report on Sexual Violence against Children in Cambodia for the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC), a research paper on the enforcement of the European Convention of Human Rights in Russia for the organization Sutyajnik, a guide on how to follow up on the recommendations of the UN Committee against torture for the Centre guinéen de Promotion et de Protection des Droits de l’Homme and a parallel report on Violence against women and girls for the Human Rights Association of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Her research focusses broadly on the issue of social justice under both Constitutional and International Human Rights Law. In 2014, she obtained a 50K SSHRC grant for a research project on social justice as a fundamental principle in Canadian Constitutional Law. She has published on the enforcement of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in several jurisdictions and, in 2014, she was the Canadian National Rapporteur on “Social and economic rights as fundamental rights” at the XIXth International Congress of Comparative Law in Vienna.

Born and raised in Germany, Mirja immigrated to Canada in 2007. She holds a law degree from the University of Düsseldorf (Germany) and a Master’s degree in International and Comparative Human Rights Law from McGill University (2001). In 2007, she obtained her PhD with distinction from the University of Düsseldorf (Germany), her thesis dealing with the justiciability of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Before joining UQAM, first as a lecturer and then as a professor, she taught at the University of Düsseldorf and worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She is fluent in German, English and French.

Jon Unruh – McGill Department of Geography (web page)

John Unruh
Professor Unruh teaches and researches in the areas of international development, land tenure, legal geography, and global environmental change. His particular emphasis is on post-war land and property rights as part of the peace process. He has worked with the UN and other donors and the governments of Mozambique, Somalia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Liberia on land policy reform in the context of post-war recovery. Professor Unruh is interested in the emergence of multiple, informal normative orders regarding land rights during and after armed conflict, and how these can be reconciled with land and property prescriptions in peace accords, and formal land policy reform in a peace process. His current interest focuses on the role that evidence for claim plays in this reconciliation. In an environmental change context, Dr. Unruh is interested in how land tenure problems lead to a ‘clearing to claim’ approach to land, which results in large-scale deforestation in the developing world; and the intersection of land tenure and biodiversity in Africa. He has published widely on issues of land tenure in the peace process, and the land tenure aspects of environmental change and international development. Professor Unruh has also worked as a consultant for FAO, the World Bank, USAID, and IDRC.

Shauna Van Praagh – McGill Faculty of Law (web page)

Shauna Van Praagh
Professor Shauna Van Praagh incorporates human rights and social diversity issues into her teaching of Extracontractual Obligations/Torts and Graduate Legal Methodology. She has also taught Social Diversity and Law, a course which explores interdiciplinary perspectives on law, identity and social orders, Children and Law, and Foundations of Canadian Law.

Professor Van Praagh's research interests focus on the rights, duties and needs of young people, on religious and cultural identities within family, community and school, on the challenges to governance structures posed by social diversity, and on the relationship between law and literature particularly in pedagogy.

Professor Van Praagh has acted as a research consultant to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission and to the Law Commission of Canada on its "Beyond Conjugality" project; has carried out research on the Hasidic Jewish communities of Montreal; and has led judicial education workshops exploring social diversity in the theory and practice of family law.

Daniel Weinstock – McGill Faculty of Law / McGill Institute for Health & Social Policy (web page)

Daniel Weinstock (Photo by Sean Henry, CBC)
Professor Daniel Weinstock's research interests have spanned widely across a wide range of topics in contemporary moral and political philosophy – from the just management of ethnocultural and religious diversity in modern liberal democracies, to state policy with respect to children, families, and educational institutions.

His main research interests at present have to do with the problem of health equity, and with issues of justice and inclusion as they arise in the organization of modern cities.

The guiding thread of his research has been to connect philosophical and ethical argument with institutional reasoning. It is marked by the firm conviction that moral and political philosophers have paid insufficient attention to the institutional parameters that both enable and constrain the realization of normative ideals. His areas of expertise also include the politics of language and identity, democracy, citizenship, and pluralism.

He joined McGill’s Faculty of Law in August 2012, and was appointed Director of the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy in 2013. He was appointed Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the Faculties of Law and of Arts on June 1, 2020, for a seven year mandate.

Jennifer M. Welsh -  McGill Faculty of Law

Professor Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. She was previously Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013-2016, she served as the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on the Responsibility to Protect. 

Professor Welsh is the author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on humanitarian intervention, the evolution of the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ in international society, the UN Security Council, and Canadian foreign policy. Her most recent books include The Return of History: Conflict, Migration and Geopolitics in the 21st century (2016), which was based on her CBC Massey Lectures, and The Responsibility to Prevent: Overcoming the Challenges of Atrocity Prevention (2015). Professor Welsh also sits on the editorial boards of the journals Global Responsibility to Protect, International Journal, and Ethics and International Affairs, and on the Advisory Boards of the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation.

Genevieve Renard Painter  –  Concordia University:  

Genevieve Renard Painter is an assistant professor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute. Dr. Painter’s research examines law’s role in shaping the struggle for justice, at local and global levels. Her recent work documents the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and gender equality rights in Canada. 

Dr. Painter holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as degrees in common and civil law from the Faculty of Law, McGill University.  She is a member of the Quebec bar and has practiced in the areas of Aboriginal, constitutional, and human rights law.

Pablo Gilabert  – Concordia University

Professor Gilabert is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University. Professor Gilabert’s areas of specialization are social and political philosophy and ethics. Within these areas, Professor Gilabert’s research and teaching interests include topics in social justice and human rights. Professor Gilabert has been an HLA Hart Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, a DAAD Fellow at the University of Frankfurt, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, a Visiting Fellow at the University of Montreal, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow in the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Professor Gilabert is currently working on a project titled "Work, Well-Being, and Social Justice," funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Amar Khoday - University of Manitoba  

Professor Khoday is currently an Associate Professor (with tenure) at the Faculty of Law of the University of Manitoba, where he began as an Assistant Professor in 2012. Dr. Khoday earned his Doctor of Civil Law (2014) and Master of Laws (2008) degrees from McGill University’s Faculty of Law in Montreal and Juris Doctor (2004) from the New England School of Law in Boston. In 2011, he was awarded a Doctoral Teaching Fellowship by the McGill Faculty of Law and taught criminal law during the summer session with Professor Angela Campbell. During his doctoral studies, Dr. Khoday also worked as a human rights researcher at McGill University’s Social Equity and Diversity Education Office. Prior to joining the University of Manitoba in 2012 in 2012, he completed a term as Executive Director of the McGill International Criminal Justice Clinic. 

Professor Khoday also has a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in History and Southern Asian Studies, as well as a Master of Arts degree in History, both at Concordia University. He is the author of over 15 published writings, including articles and book chapters.

Associate members

 Payam Akhavan - Massey College; University of Toronto; Permanent Court of Arbitration

Payam Akhavan

Payam Akhavan, (payam.akhavan [at] mcgill.ca (email)) LLB (Osgoode), LLM SJD (Harvard), is Senior Fellow at Massey College, Distinguished Visitor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto, and Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. He was previously Full Professor at McGill University Faculty of Law, with prior appointments at Yale Law School, Oxford University, Université Paris Nanterre, European University Institute, and Leiden University.

He has published extensively on international criminal law and in 2017 he delivered the CBC Massey Lectures. Professor Akhavan was the first Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor's Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and also served with the UN in Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Timor Leste. He has served as counsel in notable cases before the European Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice, including the Application of Genocide Convention Case (The Gambia v Myanmar) regarding the persecuted Rohingya minority. His human rights work has been featured in the New York Times, BBC HARDtalk, CBC Ideas, Maclean's, and other media.

 Michael Brown - McGill Institute for the Study of International Development

Michael J. Brown
Michael Brown (michael.j.brown [at] mcgill.ca (email)) is a Professor of Practice in Conflict Mediation at McGill University's Institute for the Study of International Development, and a regular consulting advisor to the United Nations (UN) on mediation, conflict and peacebuilding. His work focuses primarily on natural resource and land conflicts.

He was the UN's Senior Mediation Expert on Land and Natural Resource Conflicts for the Department of Political Affairs' (DPA) Standby Mediation Team, and a Senior Expert on Natural Resources, Environmental Diplomacy and Mediation for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). He has also held leadership and senior advisory positions with the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN DPA, the World Bank, and UN peace missions. Among many professional and academic publications, Michael is one of the principal contributing authors of Natural Resources and Conflict: A Guide for Mediation Practitioners (United Nations, 2015).

His experience spans dozens of countries through Latin America, Asia, Africa and North America. His natural resource conflict expertise covers extractive industries, land and water disputes, particularly when local and/or indigenous communities are involved or affected. In Canada, he has worked on environmental and natural resources law, aboriginal law, policy development and alternative dispute resolution. He is now focusing his Canadian efforts on consensus building, mediation, and the design and strengthening of policy and institutional frameworks to promote conflict prevention and resolution. He was called to the Bar in the Province of Ontario, and is a Certified Mediator in the Province of Québec. He speaks English, Spanish and French.

Daniel Cere – McGill Faculty of Religious Studies

Daniel Cere
Daniel Cere is Associate Professor of Religion, Law, and Public Policy in the Faculty of Religious Studies. He also chairs the CREOR Religion and Globalization committee as well as the Catholic Studies committee in the Faculty of Arts. Cere collaborated with former Dean Ellen Aitken in forging a McGill partnership with an international network of universities, the Faith and Globalization Initiative.

He has directed the international summer course for the Faith and Globalization Initiative that networks with over 30 universities across the world. He also helped to design and direct the Birks Forum on the World’s Religions and Public Policy launched in 2011. His work on religion and public policy has focused on debates over issues related to gender, sexuality and marriage.

He is the director of the Institute for the Study of Marriage, Law and Culture, and a founding director of the Newman Institute of Catholic Studies.

Achraf El Hila - Université de Rabat, Maroc

Achraf El HilaAchraf a fait ses études en Droit International, parcours Droit des échanges Euro-Méditerranéens, à l’Université de Rabat/Maroc et à l’Université de Bordeaux. Tout au long de son cursus universitaire, il a été membre des Cliniques de droit de Rabat et de Bordeaux. Son expérience en tant qu’étudiant clinicien lui a permis de mettre en pratique ses acquis théoriques et de contribuer à un meilleur accès aux droits pour les usagers des Cliniques.

A l’issue de son parcours, il a soutenu un mémoire de fin d’études sur « le principe de non-refoulement en Droit des réfugiés : Portée et difficultés de mise en œuvre ». Il a également effectué un stage de huit mois auprès de l’Unité de Protection du Haut-Commissariat des Nations Unies pour les Réfugiés.

Achraf effectue actuellement un doctorat sur la protection juridique des migrants contre la détention arbitraire à Faculté des sciences juridiques, économiques et sociales de Rabat. Il continue, en tant qu’étudiant chercheur, de participer aux activités de la Clinique Juridique de Rabat.

Ian Hamilton - Canadian Human Rights Commission

Ian Hamilton
Ian Hamilton served as Executive Director of Equitas from January 2004 to June 2020. He first joined the organization in 1997. Before coming to Equitas, Ian worked for the Coordinating Committee of Human Rights Organizations of Thailand for 16 months in Bangkok, assisting their campaign for the establishment of a National Human Rights Commission. From 1992-1995, he worked in a number of positions, including Asia Program Officer, at the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Rights and Democracy) in Montreal.

Ian Hamilton was a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (now Cooperation Canada) from 2017 to 2020, serving as the Chair of the Membership Committee. He is also a volunteer member of the Community Advisory Group of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and a member of the DIGNA Advisory Committee.

Ian Hamilton graduated from the University of Toronto in 1990 with a Bachelor’s Degree in History.

Homa Hoodfar - Concordia University

Homa Hoodfar
Homa Hoodfar is a Professor Emerita of Anthropology, at Concordia University, Montreal. Her field-based research and expertise are in political economy and legal anthropology; focusing on reproductive rights; Afghan women and youth refugees in Iran and Pakistan; women in formal and informal politics; hijab and dress codes as political institutions; gender and citizenship; Muslim women’s sports as politics; and gender and the public sphere in Muslim contexts.

Describing herself as an academic in the service of civil society, Professor Hoodfar has also been actively involved in the Research and Publication Division of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) Network’s whose mission is to promote gender equality and plural democracy, since the 1980s.

Her more recent books include Women’s Sport as Politics in Muslim Contexts (WLUML, 2015); Sexuality in Muslim Contexts: Restrictions and Resistance, edited with Anissa Hellie (Zed Books, 2012); and Electoral Politics: Making Quotas work for women co-authored with Mona Tajali (WLUML, 2011); along with numerous articles based on her different research projects.

Nadia Khrouz - Université Mohammed V-FSJES Agdal, Maroc

Nadia KhrouzNadia Khrouz détient un doctorat de Sciences Politiques du Laboratoire PACTE de l’Université Pierre-Mendès-France (Grenoble). Elle a soutenu sa thèse sur les pratiques administratives et juridiques du droit des étrangers au Maroc en 2016. Ses recherches portent sur la mise en œuvre des dispositifs liés au séjour des étrangers et aux sanctions au séjour irrégulier, aux dimensions relatives à la famille, aux déviances, mais également à l’usage militant du droit, aux interactions entre l’administration et l’usage, ainsi que plus largement aux droits de l’homme.

Après avoir travaillé pendant plus de quatra ans au sein du Conseil national des droits de l’Homme (CNDH) et de sa section protection des droits des étrangers, Nadia Khrouz est, depuis février 2021, Enseignante-Chercheure (Professeure Assistante) en Sciences politiques à l’Université Mohammed V-FSJES Agdal. Elle est par ailleurs associée au LMI Movida et au LPED (UMR 151/IRD-AMU), Marseille.

Yolanda Muñoz

Yolanda Muñoz
Yolanda Muñoz completed a Master and a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from 1994–2003 as part of the academic excellence program in this field at El Colegio de México (Mexico City). She focused on Gender Studies and the Ainu people of Northern Japan. In 2004, her thesis “The Resistance Literature of the Ainu Women” (“La literatura de Resistencia de las mujeres ainu”) received the Mexican Academy of Science’s award to the best doctoral thesis in the category “Cultural Studies.” Her work was published by El Colegio de México in 2008 (Open Access via JSTOR). To complete her doctoral work, she was awarded a Sylff Fellowship and a scholarship of Ministry of Education of Japan to become a research student at the University of Tokyo (1998–2000). She also received financial support from the National Council of Science and Technology (Mexico) from 1994–1997.

Parallel to this work, as a full-time wheelchair user, Yolanda Muñoz has accumulated significant experience in the advancement of human rights of persons with disabilities in Mexico, in Quebec, and at the international level. She published a research on the situation of Women with Disabilities in Mexico (INMUJERES, 2003), and has taught the course “Gender and Disability” at the McGill Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies since 2006. She has collaborated with the Japan Program at the Inter-American Development Bank (2004–2005) and served as Program Officer for the Disability Rights Fund and the Disability Rights Advocacy Fund in 2010 and from January 2012 through December 2015. Her responsibilities included overseeing the grants of the LAC and MENA regions, as well as some projects of the Strategic Partnerships initiative. Since 2018, she has worked as an external consultant for Global Greengrants Fund, to promote anti-ableist practices in their grant-making strategies. She is currently co-investigator for the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Program, with the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism at the McGill Faculty of Law, together with Professor Sébastien Jodoin and Professor Nandini Ramanujam. She is a Senior Research Associate with the Canada Research Chair in Human Rights and the Environment and contributes to its research and policy activities on the intersections of disability and environmental justice.

Laura Madokoro - Carleton University (web page)

Laura MadokoroLaura Madokoro’s research explores the history of global migration and its influence in the shaping of the modern world. I am especially interested in the histories of settler colonialism, refugees, humanitarianism, human rights and race relations.

A native of Quebec’s Eastern Townships, Laura rambled off along a series of different paths, including a teaching gig in Japan and a stint as an archivist at Library and Archives Canada, before making a return to academic life in 2007. She was a Trudeau Scholar in 2009. She completed her PhD in History at the University of British Columbia in 2012 and spent the following year with the History Department at Columbia University as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow. She then moved on to pursue postdoctoral work at Columbia University, New York City.

Laura Madokoro is currently preparing a manuscript on the history of refugees in Asia during the Cold War, looking specifically at the migration and resettlement of Chinese refugees to the white settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. She also has a number of articles in the works covering topics such as the creation of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees Refugee, photography and Chinese exclusion in New Zealand and humanitarian relief efforts in colonial Hong Kong in the 1950s.

She has published in the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Canadian Historical Review, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association and the Urban History Review. As someone who cares deeply about the political implications of the historical craft, particularly as they relate to contemporary events, Laura has also contributed a number of comment pieces to the Globe and Mail, the National Post and activehistory.ca.

Aristide Nononsi – University of Ottawa (Human Rights Office)

Aristide Nononsi

Dr. Aristide Nononsi was the Associate Director of the Centre for Developing Area Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Senior Boulton Fellow in International Development and the Law. he is the former Executive Director of the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (2012 – 2014).

He has been Executive Director of the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa since 2012.

In November 2014, he was appointed as the UN's Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in the Sudan, for his extensive experience in technical assistance and capacity-building activities on human rights systems and procedures in the region.

From 2007-2011, he was the  Executive Director of the Centre for Developing Area Studies in the Institute for the Study of International Development (McGill University) and Senior Boulton Fellow in International Development and the Law, Faculty of Law.  In this capacity, he has taught and published on issues related to the law of international organizations, fragile states, international labour law and human rights, children’s rights and international development. From 1999-2007, Dr. Nononsi served as Head of the Appeals Committee Unit in the African Development Bank (AfDB) in Cote d’Ivoire and Tunisia. He has also worked from 1992–1998 for the International Labour Office (ILO) on Child Labour, International Labour Standards, and Maritime Labour Law in Switzerland, Côte d’Ivoire and Algeria. Aristide Nononsi completed his doctoral studies at the Université Montesquieu, Bordeaux4, France, specializing in public international law. He also holds two DEA, one in political science from the Science Po Bordeaux and the other in Law, from Université Bordeaux I.

Rodziana M. Razali, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia

Rodziana Mohamed Razali

Dr. Rodziana Mohamed Razali holds a PhD from the National University of Malaysia and an LL.M from the University of Melbourne. From 2018 to 2019, she was attached to McGill’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism as a Steinberg Post-Doctoral Fellow in International Migration Law. She was previously in the Malaysian Judicial and Legal Service and currently is a senior lecturer at the Islamic Science University of Malaysia. Other than migration law and policy, her research interests focus on the intersection between birth registration, legal identity, prevention of statelessness and rights of the minorities, including refugees and migrants. In 2018, she was appointed as a co-researcher to provide a consultancy service on Analysis of the Situation of Children and Women in Malaysia (2018), a project with UNICEF Malaysia. She has recently been engaged by the Government of Malaysia as a lead consultant to undertake a research to re-evaluate specific policies addressing temporary work permit holders in Malaysia and by UNICEF Malaysia to assess gaps in birth registration for children affected by migration in Peninsular Malaysia. In the course of her research, she has worked closely and collaborated with UNHCR Malaysia, UNHCR Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific and the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness on various talks, trainings and projects.

Cecilia Thompson

Cecilia Thompson
Cecilia Thompson (cecilia.thompson [at] gmail.com (email)) is a senior human rights consultant with over 25 years of experience with the United Nations, governments and civil society. She has developed a strong expertise in the implementation of international human rights standards and procedures. She has worked extensively in the field human rights education, and has proven advocacy, capacity-building and training experience.

She was Senior Program Officer with Equitas - International Centre for Human Rights Education where she contributed to the design, implementation and evaluation of multi-year human rights education programs; Human Rights Officer with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights working in the field of minority rights, the rights of persons with HIV/AIDS, as well as that of forced displacement, and the nexus between human rights and humanitarian law; and Program Officer with a number of NGOs, including the International Commission of Jurists and the International Service for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. Her overseas experience has included working in Papua New Guinea on health care issues, and in Vanuatu on development assistance with the British High Commission.  

As a consultant, Cecilia has worked with Global Affairs Canada, La Francophonie, Rights & Democracy and Development & Peace in Montreal, and the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Sri Lanka. This has included supporting States in implementing the Universal Periodic Review process of the Human Rights Council, drafting, implementing and evaluating human rights and development projects, designing human rights education manuals and toolkits, and undertaking human rights research. Furthermore, she has implemented human rights training workshops in Cambodia, Costa Rica, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, and Tunisia.

She has published a number of articles on the protection of the rights of minorities, fundamental standards of humanity, and the human rights work of the United Nations.

She holds an LLM in International Law from the Université du Québec à Montréal, and a BA Honours in International Relations and Development from the University of Sussex, UK. She speaks English, French and German.

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