Andrew Byrnes

Andrew Byrnes has been Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales since 2005. He is Chair of the Committee of Management of the Australian Human Rights Centre at UNSW, and served as Associate Dean (Research) from 2006 to mid -2008. Previously he was Professor of Law at the Australian National University (2001¬-2005), a member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong (1989-2001), where he was Director of the Centre for Comparative and Public Law (1995-2001), and the University of Sydney (1985-1986). He was educated at the Australian National University, Harvard and Columbia Law Schools, and the University of Bonn.

He is also a member of the Diplomacy Training Program Board, the NSW Bar Association Human Rights Committee, and the International Humanitarian Law Committee of the NSW Red Cross. He is Co-Director of Studies of the International Law Association (Australian Branch) (2005-), and has served on the Council of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. He is also a member of the Asian Development Bank’s External Forum on Gender and Development and on the advisory committee of a number of international NGOs. He has given expert evidence on international law issues in a number of cases, including before the Indonesian Constitutional Court in 2007 in the “Bali 9” death penalty challenge.

He has acted as a consultant to international organisations on international and domestic human rights issues, including the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, the ILO, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and UNESCAP. During the elaboration of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, he served as international legal adviser to the delegation of the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions to the UN General Assembly Ad Hoc Committee drafting the Convention (2004-2006).

Areas of particular interest include: international law, international humanitarian law, human rights law, bills of rights, domestic implementation of international (human rights) norms, national human rights institutions, disability and law, gender and international law

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Andrea Durbach

Andrea Durbach is Associate Professor and Director of the Australian Human Rights Centre at the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales. Prior to joining UNSW, she was a political trial lawyer and human rights advocate in South Africa for 8 years and after moving to Sydney in 1989, she joined the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), an independent litigation and policy institute, where she was Head of Legal Practice and Director for 13 years. Andrea has been a part-time member of the Administrative Decisions Tribunal (Legal Services Division), part-time commissioner of the NSW Law Reform Commission and board member of the Diplomacy Training Program. She is currently secretary of the Human Rights Council of Australia, a member of the board of the NSW Legal Aid Commission, the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Human Rights, and the Advisory Council of Jurists of the Asia-Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions (APF). She is a foundation fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. Her research focuses on access to justice and public interest litigation; barriers to the implementation of the right to health; reparations and the Stolen Generations; and the role and impact of national human rights institutions in the Asia Pacific region (the subject of a 3-year ARC funded project with the APF).

David Leary

Dr David Leary is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Law and specialises in Public International Law particularly climate change law and policy, international environmental law more broadly, the Law of the Sea and international law and the Polar Regions. His current research focuses specifically on issues relating to climate change, nanotechnology, and renewable energy.

Dr Leary is a member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law and its working group on High Seas Governance as well as the Working Group on the High Seas and Deep Seabed of the Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts and Islands. He participated in the recent meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Poznan, Poland as a member of a UN observer delegation, and the International Expert Meeting on Addressing Climate Change through Sustainable Management of Tropical Forests convened by the International Tropical Timber Organisation.

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Jane McAdam

Dr Jane McAdam is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of NSW. She is also the Director of International Law Programs, the Director of International Moots, and the Director of the International Refugee and Migration Law project at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law. She is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, and has also been the Director of Oxford’s International Summer School in Forced Migration. She previously taught in the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney, and at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford, where she obtained her doctorate.

Jane is the author of Complementary Protection in International Refugee Law (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007); co-author with Guy S Goodwin-Gill of the University of Oxford of the third edition of The Refugee in International Law (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007); and the editor of Forced Migration, Human Rights and Security (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2008). She is the guest editor of a special issue of the Refugee Survey Quarterly on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and guest editor (with Tim Stephens) of the climate change law issue of the Australian International Law Journal.

Jane is an advisor to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees on the international law dimensions of climate-induced displacement. She is the Associate Rapporteur of the Convention Refugee Status and Subsidiary Protection Working Party for the International Association of Refugee Law Judges. She is also a Member of the International Law Association (World) International Teaching Committee; Vice-President of the Refugee Advice and Casework Service in Sydney; on the Steering Committee of Green Cross Australia’s ‘Sea-Level Rise: A People’s Assembly’; and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre. Jane has worked on a variety of projects with UNHCR, the European Union, Green Cross Australia, the Czech–Helsinki Committee, Amnesty International, the Refugee Council of Australia, and the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Australian International Law Journal, a former General Editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal, and a former member of the Editorial Board of the Sydney Law Review.

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Christopher Michaelsen

Christopher Michaelsen is the convenor of the International Law and Policy Group and a Research Fellow at the UNSW Law Faculty. He teaches and specialises in human rights, public international law and international security. Chris is a member of the Gilbert & Tobin Centre of Public Law and an associate of the Australian Human Rights Centre.

Before joining UNSW, he served as a Human Rights Officer (Anti-Terrorism) at the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Warsaw, Poland. He has previously worked for the United Nations Department for Disarmament Affairs in New York City, and at the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University in Canberra. He has also served as a consultant to the Asian Law Group in Semarang, Indonesia, and to the Center for Global Counter-Terrorism Cooperation in New York City.

Chris was educated at the University of Munich, the University of Hamburg, the University of Queensland and the Australian National University. In 2004, he was a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St Andrews. Chris was the inaugural editor of Security Challenges, a quarterly refereed journal published through the Kokoda Foundation, Canberra. His particular areas of interest include Human Rights, Public International Law, Disarmament, Security, Terrorism/Counter-Terrorism, and International Humanitarian Law.

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Gillian Moon

Gillian Moon is Director of the Human Rights & Social Justice Stream (Master of Laws) and Director of the Master of Human Rights Law & Policy at the School of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia. She is responsible for coordination of human rights law and policy course offerings, strategic planning and liaison with related disciplines within UNSW. Gillian has expertise in international human rights law generally, with a particular focus on international trade and investment law and their intersections with human rights, the rights of minorities (particularly indigenous peoples), human rights and development, women’s human rights and economic and social rights

She has created and taught numerous undergraduate and postgraduate law courses at the University of NSW, including Human Rights in International Trade & Development, Human rights in the Global Economy, Transnational Business and Human Rights, International Law of Equality and Non-Discrimination, International Trade Law: Environment & Development and Law, Rights & Development. She is a Member of the Management Committee of the Australian Human Rights Centre (AHRC), University of New South Wales; Chair of the Human Rights Education Sub-Committee of the AHRC; and leads the “Human Rights Impacts of WTO Law” research project.

Justine Nolan

Justine Nolan is the Deputy Director of the Australian Human Rights Centre and a senior law lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of NSW, Australia (UNSW). Her research interests are in human rights and corporate accountability. She has worked closely with broad range of representatives from NGOs, government, companies and the United Nations in consulting on business and human rights issues. Prior to her appointment at UNSW in 2004 she was the Director of the Business and Human Rights Program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First) in the United States. She is an editor of the Human Rights Defender.

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Rosemary Rayfuse

Professor Rosemary Rayfuse specialises in Public International Law generally, including international humanitarian law, use of force, and international dispute settlement, however, she specialises in law of the sea, with particular emphasis on international fisheries law, high seas governance and international environmental law as it relates to the marine environment and to climate change. She teaches and researches in the areas of the use of force, international humanitarian law, and international environmental law. Her research focuses on the processes of development of normative structures within international law and their ability to adapt to emerging pressures such as illegal fishing, climate change and/ or threats to international peace and security.

Professor Rayfuse holds an LLB from Queen’s University, an LLM from the University of Cambridge, where she was awarded the Clive Parry Prize for International Law, and a PhD from the University of Utrecht. She is a member of the editorial board of numerous international law journals and she is a member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law, Co-Chair of its Working Group on High Seas Governance and a member of its Arctic Task Force.  She has advised numerous governments, inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations, and has also been appointed as an Ambassador to the One Million Women campaign which aims to inspire women in Australia to cut CO2 emissions by1 million tonnes.

Professor Rayfuse supervises postgraduate research students across a spectrum of international law topics. Current and past postgraduate supervisions have been on topics as diverse as dispute settlement in ASEAN, regulation of invasive alien species, a unified law of armed conflict, the conduct of UN peace operations, statelessness and migrant workers, the right to water, and the international legal framework for sub-seabed carbon capture and storage.

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Catherine Renshaw

Catherine Renshaw is a research fellow of the Australian Human Rights Centre and Director of its project on Building Human Rights in the Region through Horizontal Transnational Networks: the Role of the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions. In 2006, the Australian Human Rights Centre was awarded a major grant by the Australian Research Council to investigate the role of national human rights institutions (NHRIs) in implementing human rights in the Asia Pacific region and the role of the regional network of NHRIs, the Asia Pacific Forum (APF) in establishing and strengthening NHRIs. The APF is a partner in the project, which involves conducting detailed case studies of human rights commissions and interviews with commissioners, government officials and United Nations representatives. Catherine’s research and publications are primarily in the area of human rights law and public international law. Research interests include the domestic implementation of international legal obligations, the human rights treaty bodies system, implementation of economic, cultural and social rights and international human rights non-governmental organisations.

Shirley Scott

Associate Professor Shirley Scott researches and teaches in the School of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of New South Wales. Associate Professor Scott has been at the forefront of the resurgence of interest in International Law within International Relations. She has worked on collaborative projects with international law scholars from Australia, Europe and North America and has received funding from bodies including the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and the Australian Research Council. Her research engages with a number of fields of international law including international environmental law, international law and the use of force, the law of the sea, and the law of treaties. Within International Relations, Associate Professor Scott engages primarily with theoretical work on political realism and constructivism. She employs historical, legal, and political research methodologies and has a special interest in political developments impacting on the system of international law as a whole. Associate Professor Scott is currently a member of the Executive Council of the Asian Society of International Law. Together with Professor Rayfuse, Associate Professor Scott established the successful Masters program in International Law and International Relations at UNSW.

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