Rachel Murray

Rachel Murray is the Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and Professor of International Human Rights Law. She joined the Institute in October 2025 and prior to that was the Director of the Human Rights Implementation Centre at the University of Bristol which she co-founded with Professor Sir Malcolm Evans in 2009. 

Rachel’s personal practitioner and academic work has developed in three inter-related areas: the African human rights system, monitoring of places of detention, and implementation of human rights decisions (ESRC funded, (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/hrlip/). For the latter, Rachel and her team were awarded the ESRC Outstanding International Impact Prize in 2023.

She has written widely in these areas for academic and scholarly audiences and also as a practitioner. She ran her own independent consultancy where she worked for, among others, the UN, OSCE, Open Society Justice Initiative, African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, NANRHI (Network of African National Human Rights Institutions), APCOF (African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum), the UK National Preventive Mechanism, and CEELI Institute.

Rachel advises and engages on a regular basis with national, regional and international organisations, including, in particular, the African Commission and Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and the Pan-African Parliament. She has worked with governments, national human rights institutions, parliamentarians, the judiciary, civil society organisations and academics. She has acted as amicus including, currently, before the African Court, together with the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, in App.006/2012, African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights v Republic of Kenya. She has held a number of grants, including a major grant from the UK Economic Social and Research Council on the implementation of human rights decisions which tracked decisions from the regional and UN treaty bodies to examine the extent to which the States have complied with them. She is Global Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame London Law School, a member of the Academic Expert Panel of Doughty Street Chambers and is also a magistrate. She has previously held trusteeship positions at INTERIGHTS, the Human Dignity Trust (HDT) and the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA), the latter of which she was also its Vice-Chair. She is a member of technical committees drafting standards and guidelines on rights and implementation of decisions, for instance, for the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and currently engaged in developing a Model Law on the Implementation of African Human Rights Bodies with the Pan-African Parliament and Centre for Human Rights in Pretoria.