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Building Human Rights Nancy Eisenhauer Fellow in Law
The University of Oxford’s Institute of Human Rights (IHR) has a revolutionary vision: to act as a bridge between human-rights scholars of the highest calibre and human-rights practitioners working in a myriad of environments around the world, in order to advance simultaneously the quality and impact of human-rights work.
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lthough visionary, the work of the Institute of Human Rights is not a mere vision. Today, the study of human rights cuts across every discipline in the University. It is, in the words of one scholar, ‘the common moral language’ of our times. Yet, until now, that research and teaching has not been coordinated in a centralised way at Oxford, nor has there been a concentrated effort to link the mass of the University’s research and teaching to the world of the human-rights practitioner. The Institute of Human Rights is designed to create synergy – ‘the interaction of two or more agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects’ – both within the University and in the wider community, for the ultimate benefit of both. The IHR will act not only as an intellectual focus for the human-rights work of the Law Faculty and University, but as a physical arena for such work as well. It will have a permanent home in a new building at Mansfield College, with its own staff and sustainable funding. As a result, the IHR will be able to: • Host and fund visiting human-rights scholars; • Provide funding and space for clinical teaching;
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Principal Helena Kennedy with the architects’ model for the IHR
Moreover, by bringing academics and practitioners together within its intellectual and physical space, the IHR aspires to draw on outside resources to supplement faculty teaching in the area of human-rights law by, for example: • Offering graduate scholarships to support outstanding students with a strong interest in human rights, who would not otherwise be in a position to fund their studies from their own resources; • Creating links with law firms and other legal practitioners working on human-rights cases, providing resources and financed internships for committed and skilled Oxford students; • Offering placement assistance for Oxford law graduates in legal-aid firms and solicitors’ firms and barristers’ chambers with human-rights work;
• Provide funding and space for graduate students to work;
• Further developing undergraduate and graduate clinical programmes in human-rights law;
• Accommodate conferences, seminars and moot courts on topical human-rights issues.
• Assisting faculty members in creating new University course options in human-rights law.
