Bringing together human rights researchers, practitioners and policy-makers from across the globe
This page features current research being conducted by academics and graduate students based in the University of Oxford Faculty of Law. If you would like to have your research included here please fill in this form.
Nicholas Bamforth and Laura Hoyano
Nicholas Bamforth (Queen's) and Laura Hoyano (Wadham) are currently working on a text book - entitled Human Rights Law and Principles in the UK - to be published, on completion during 2013, by Oxford University Press. The Human Rights Act 1998 has been in force for over twelve years and is the object of increasing political hostility. In reality, it occupies the field before national courts in conjunction with human rights protections derived from EU law, from the common law, and occasionally from extra-European international treaties. Against this background, the authors find it surprising that many accounts of human rights law written in the UK pay almost exclusive attention to the role of the European Convention, notwithstanding the force of the other judicially-recognised sources. As such, they try to present a detailed account of human rights in national law without excluding other enforceable bases for rights-protection; for undue focus on the Convention, apart from being inaccurate, arguably fuels a political/media culture in which the Human Rights Act is improperly singled out for praise or blame. They believe that the benefits of this approach can be seen in areas such as liberty, life or non-discrimination, where current national-level protections cannot be understood without as strong a focus being placed on EU norms as is generally placed on European Convention rights, where the judgments of the CJEU and ECtHR seem often to refer to decisions or dicta of the other Court, and where socially sensitive and well-informed analyses of proportionality and judicial deference need to be deployed whatever the jursidictional basis for the legal rulings in issue. In addition, analogous questions of constitutional principle - for example, how far the protection of human rights should be a matter for the courts rather than the legislature - are in play and in need of analysis whatever the jurisdictional origin of the rights in issue
Commissioned by: UN Working Group on Discrimination Against Women in Law and Practice
Professor Sandra Fredman and Professor Frances Raday
Research Assistant: Jemma Queenborough
Laura Hilly
Laura's doctoral research focuses on judicial diversity in appellate courts. Using gender as a case study, it aims to investigate what contributions gender diversity brings to the task of judging. It focuses explicitly on the relationship between identity groups and decisional collegiality; and the impact that intersectionality has on the inquiry into gendered judicial contributions.
Her research consists of both doctrinal analysis and empirical interviews. It is explicitly international in scope – focusing upon appellate courts in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia, as well as a case study analysis of recent jurisprudence of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights.
Meghan Campbell
CEDAW protects the entire spectrum of human rights, civil and political and economic, social and cultural. The rights protection is not complete as basic socio-economic rights, to food, water, shelter and social assistance are missing from the treaty. My thesis questions whether CEDAW can use substantive equality to transcend its textual limitation to protect these rights?
This project begins by creating an evaluative framework which re-configures how women, poverty and equality have been understood within CEDAW. In the past, both women and equality have been narrowly conceived under CEDAW and this must give way to a more robust definition to better capture the unique experience of women’s poverty. Poverty for women is not exclusively resource deprivation and to combat this equality cannot merely be treating likes alike. Rather poverty needs to understand the deprivation of agency and control over a woman’s life and equality must be broadened to combat the power relations and systematic forces that dominate and impoverish women.
With this framework in place, my thesis will examine eight countries from a range of geographic locations and with varying gross national incomes. The preliminary analysis I have conducted indicates that the CEDAW Committee, which reviews state compliance with the treaty, is aware of poverty and how it can impact the fulfillment of the treaty obligations. The problem is the treatment of poverty has been inconsistent and not properly anchored in the text; thus it is unclear if women’s poverty is discrimination. Nor has the Committee consistently advocated for the implementation of socio-economic as a method to alleviate poverty. My argument will be that CEDAW can use a ‘living tree’ interpretation of equality to address and ameliorate women’s poverty as discrimination. By seeing poverty as gender discrimination the Committee can, notwithstanding its institutional limitations, comprehensively address the stigma and stereotypes surrounding poor women and redistribution.
Anup Surendranath
The thesis examines the suitability of quotas, as developed in the legal discourse on affirmative action in India, as a means to achievement empowerment of marginalised groups. The central concern of the thesis is that group-based affirmative action policies like the one developed in India, needs to address crucial normative concerns in terms of identification of beneficiaries, distribution of benefits within the beneficiary group and modeof delivering the benefits to attain more legitimacy. While the issue of sub-classification of beneficiary groups is one such challenge and presents the opportunity to fine-tune India’s quota policy, it is also evident that the concerns raised by the sub-classification debate cannot be fully addressed within the framework of quotas. Concerns about substantive equality cannot end with the identification of beneficiary groups and allocating quotas in higher education, public employment and representative bodies. The project of substantive equality must necessarily address the concerns about accessing benefits within the group and the ability of members within the group to benefit from such measures. This concern, though addressed partially by sub-classification, highlights the limitation of using quotas as the predominant method of remedying historical and contemporary marginalisation.
