Bonavero Discussion Group: Transnational human rights law?

The global human rights blueprint has traditionally been focused on improving human rights within states by developing supranational human rights institutions. There has also been an occasional interest in the role that state-to-state relations can have in implementing human rights. Largely missing from this picture is an attention to the transnational ramifications of human rights, namely violations that occur in the deep societal interstice between states. Human rights law has been too steeped in its territorialism to provide anything but truncated responses to that challenge. The study of transnational law itself has often been focused on the regulation of private corporate actors or networks of public regulation rather than taking seriously the “human face” of transnationalism. What would a transnational turn in human rights look like? How one might theorize its incidence both for human rights and transnationalism? Looking at the plight of migrants and diasporas, transnational repression and diplomatic protection, as well as the manifestation of solidarity between people “here” and “there” this presentation will chart the contours of an international human rights law with yet beyond the state.

Frédéric Mégret is a full-Professor and holder of the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law at the Faculty of Law,  Faculty of Law, McGill University. In 2024-2025 he was the James S. Carpentier visiting Professor at the Columbia Law School. From 2006 to 2016 he held the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism and was subsequently named a William Dawson Scholar. He was previously an assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, a research associate at the European University Institute, and an attaché at the International Committee of the Red Cross. His research interests are in general international law, the laws of war, human rights, international criminal and transitional justice, and global mobility.

Başak Çalı is head of research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and Professor of International Law. Previously, she was professor of international law and founding director of the  Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School, Berlin. She holds a permanent visiting professorship from the I-Courts Centre for Excellence at the University of Copenhagen and is a fellow the University of Essex Human Rights Centre and the Hertie School. She has held visiting professorships in Ankara, Oslo, Paris, and Natolin and serves on the board of a number of journals.

Her expertise concerns international law and human rights. She has published widely in the fields of authority of international law, standards of review in international law, the relationship between international law and domestic law, European human rights law, UN human rights law and comparative international human rights law. She has pioneered the study of bad faith violations of human rights law (Wisconsin International Law Journal, 2018), and is the author of 'Authority of International Law: Obedience, Respect and Rebuttal' (OUP 2015), editor of International Law for International Relations (OUP, 2010), co- editor of Legalisation of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law (Routledge 2006), Migration and the European Convention on Human Rights (OUP, 2021) and Secondary Rules of Primary Importance: Standards of Review, Causality, Evidence and Attribution before International Courts and Tribunals (OUP, 2022).