Geraldine Van Bueren

Geraldine Van Bueren is a leading international human rights lawyer. She is a barrister and professor of International Human Rights Law at Queen Mary, University of London. The Independent newspaper has described her as one of the stars in the Law Department.

She is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford, and a member of Doughty Street Chambers, a set of barristers’ chambers dedicated to protecting human rights. She holds an LLB (Wales) and an LLM (London).

She is one of the original drafters of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the world’s most widely ratified human rights treaty. Her book, The International Law on the Rights of the Child (ISBN 0-7923-2687-3) has been widely cited by courts around the world. The Council of Europe has published her latest book, Child Rights in Europe — Convergence and Divergence in Judicial Protection (ISBN 92-871-6269-7), [3] which is also being published in French.

She is an advisor to the Rene Cassin Foundation, a body that seks to protect human rights and bring a Jewish voice to this issue.[4]

She is working with UNESCO on a project about how law can be used to combat poverty.

Awards

In 2003 she was awarded the Child Rights Lawyer Award. The award, jointly organised by the Law Society, UNICEF and The Lawyer magazine, recognises lawyers who have done outstanding work in the field of children's rights. She is profiled in The Lawyer in which one incident is described:

"What would you do if, while driving through a council estate on the wrong side of town, you saw a man on the ground being beaten up by a lynch mob?

Some people, perhaps only a few, would drive on shaking their heads at how dangerous the streets are while reciting excuses as to why it would be mad to get involved. Many of us might stop at a safe distance, call the police on our mobiles and get on our way. Hardly anyone –man or woman– would get out of their car, stand over the victim and try to reason with the crowd.

But Geraldine Van Bueren did just that in an act that encapsulates her fervent commitment to the sanctity of human rights."

Publications

Her selected press articles include

• 'Why a supermodel is still such a potent symbol of human dignity and liberation'
• ‘There can be no excuse for torture’
• Geraldine Van Bueren: Britain needs academics to give policy advice The Independent, 6 March 2008
• ‘Why we need more working-class professors’
• ‘Fees: a social injustice’
• ‘Law graduates: fighting for justice around the world’
• Letter: ‘ID: let the people decide’