Queen’s University Belfast is delighted to announce the 2021-22 Stephen Livingstone Lecture, delivered by Professor Verónica Gómez

THE STEPHEN LIVINGSTONE LECTURE 2021-22:

TEACHING INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS IN TIMES OF CHANGE

On 23 November, the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast hosts Professor Verónica Gómez, who will deliver the 2021-22 Stephen Livingstone lecture via MS Teams.

Three further international human rights experts will provide responses: Dr Yassin Brunger, Professor Gerd Oberleitner and Professor Frans Viljoen.

Professor Margaret Topping, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Queen’s University Belfast, will introduce the event.

Questions are invited from the audience and can be submitted at any time during the event. Two graduate students from the School of Law—Thomas Stewart and Gift Sotonye-Frank—will facilitate the Q&A along with Professor Thérèse Murphy. A third graduate student, Anurag Deb, will be live tweeting.

Bios

Verónica Gómez is president of the Global Campus of Human Rights, a flagship association in the field of human rights education, which brings together 100 universities worldwide, including Queen’s University Belfast.

In Argentina, Professor Gómez is Director for Education of the International Centre for Political Studies at the National University of San Martin where she is responsible for postgraduate programmes with regional impact such as the Master’s in Human Rights and Democracy for Latin America and the Caribbean. She also designs and promotes special programmes for the exchange of good practices in the area of human rights between states of the region, as well as training programmes for state officials, national human rights institutions and the general public.

She served as an official at the Organization of American States in Washington, DC and contributed to state policies on human rights vis-a-vis the United Nations as an advisor at the Human Rights Directorate of Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Commerce and Worship.

Yassin Brunger is Lecturer in Human Rights Law and Co-Director of the Gender Justice and Society Research Network at Queen’s University Belfast. She is a Gambian and spent 20 years living in the Middle East and is rooted in transnational decolonial understandings and ways of building solidarity within human rights.

For over a decade, her research, teaching and supervision interests include the law, politics and hierarchies of international criminal law, critical approaches to transitional justice and feminist interventions in international law. As a long-term scholar-activist, her academic work remains informed by the lived experiences of post-conflict, justice and peace of marginalised communities in the ‘Global South’ and amplifying struggles for justice within and beyond legal frameworks and academia.

She has worked with a broad range of stakeholders, including international organisations, national governments and civil society actors on post-conflict responses, particularly on issues regarding prosecutions, sexual and gender-based violence and reconciliation. She is currently completing a book project offering a critical analysis of the logics, ontologies and architecture of transitional justice entitled Narratives of Justice: The Relationship between the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council (with Cambridge University Press).

Gerd Oberleitner is UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Human Security, Professor of International Law, and Director of the European Training and Research Centre for Human Rights and Democracy at the University of Graz.

He worked in the Office of the Legal Advisor of the Austrian Foreign Ministry and in Austrian development co-operation and was Lecturer at LSE’s Centre for the Study of Human Rights and Visiting Professor at the Université du Quebéc à Montréal, Rutgers University, and DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of Bochum.

He teaches in the Global Campus of Human Rights and is co-editor of the European Yearbook of Human Rights and the publication series Human Rights Go Local.

Frans Viljoen is Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria. His area of research is regional human rights protection, with particular attention to the African Union human rights standards, institutions and processes.

He is the author of one of the leading texts on the African human rights system, and is the founding editor of the African Human Rights Law Journal. He has served as visiting professor on the African human rights system at various universities.

He is a vice-chairperson of the Global Campus of Human Rights.

In September 2021, he was elected as a member of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council.