Speaker details

Biography

Helen Duffy is Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the University of Leiden and runs ‘Human Rights in Practice (HRiP)’ specializing in strategic international human rights litigation and advice. Her practice litigates key human rights and rule of law challenges - including counter-terrorism and armed conflict, the climate crisis, slavery and judicial independence - in the European, African, Interamerican and UN human rights systems and through interventions in national courts. Before setting up HRiP in 2011, she held various posts in NGOs (eg Legal Director/INTERIGHTS; Counsel/Human Rights Watch; Legal Director/Centro para Accion Legal en Derechos Humanos Guatemala), the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and government (UK Govt. legal service and Lord Justice Scott’s Iraq Inquiry). She has a PHD (Leiden), LLM (University College London) and LLB (Glasgow). She is on the board of several NGOs. Helen has been Professor at Leiden since 2015, and is honorary/visiting professor at Glasgow, Melbourne, American and Oxford universities. Her books include “The ‘War on Terror’ and the Framework of International law (CUP, 2nd ed. 2015), ‘Strategic Human Rights Litigation: Understanding and Maximising Impact’ (Hart, 2018) and Law Applicable to Armed Conflict (with Bohrer and Dill, CUP 2020).