Simon Kieser
Before beginning my studies at Oxford, I had already gained legal and professional experience across several continents. Admitted as a lawyer in Australia and New Zealand, I had worked with the United Nations, governments, the judiciary, NGOs, and in private practice. My interests increasingly centred on the intersections between environmental governance, human rights, and cultural integrity, leading me to complete an LLM in Global Environmental Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law in the United States and an MPhil in Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge.
What drew me to Oxford’s International Human Rights Law programme was something different. The programme brings together legal practice, critical scholarship, and real-world policy questions within a genuinely international and multicultural learning environment. I particularly valued learning alongside professionals at different stages of their careers, working across different sectors and regions, and bringing very different lived experiences and understandings of what human rights mean in practice. Working with such a diverse cohort, together with academics, United Nations Special Rapporteurs, and leading human rights practitioners, challenged me to think more deeply not only about the content of human rights law, but about how knowledge can move beyond universities and institutions into advocacy, policy, and communities.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons I took from the programme was a renewed sense of the responsibilities we carry as human rights scholars and practitioners. We often describe human rights as fundamental, but their recognition and enjoyment have never been automatic or equal. Many of the rights we rely upon today were fought for over generations, and many remain denied or inaccessible. Questions of who defines rights, whose experiences shape their interpretation, who can enforce them, and who has access to the knowledge needed to invoke them remain deeply important.
For me, human rights education should not end with the person who receives it. Knowledge should be shared, questioned, stress-tested, and built upon. The education we receive at Oxford carries a responsibility to make that knowledge useful to the people and communities with whom we work, and to support them in protecting their rights, homelands, cultures, and futures.
That understanding continues to shape my work today. Through public-facing platforms, including the Oxford Human Rights Hub, I translate complex developments in human rights law and policy into more accessible English- and German-language scholarship. I engage in community-informed and community-led advocacy, including work relating to my own communities, bringing lived realities into United Nations advocacy and English-language academic scholarship.
I also serve on the Executive Board of ICOMOS Aotearoa New Zealand and participate in the ICOMOS international working groups on Our Common Dignity – Rights-Based Approaches and Indigenous Heritage, with ICOMOS being the statutory advisory body to UNESCO on cultural matters. Through this work, I contribute to discussions about how human rights, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and meaningful participation can be more fully realised within international heritage governance. My experience at Oxford also encouraged me to pursue doctoral research at Victoria University of Wellington on Indigenous justice and the World Heritage system.
I remain deeply grateful to be part of the Oxford IHRL community and particularly value encountering fellow alumni around the world through my work, advocacy, and travels. For me, the lasting value of the programme lies not simply in the human rights knowledge we acquire, but in what we choose to do with it: how we share it, whom we listen to, whose rights we help make visible, and how we translate that knowledge into practice.