Lecturers

Anna-Mária Biró, Tom Lantos Institute

Anna-Mária Bíró is the Director of the Tom Lantos Institute, an international human and minority rights organization focusing on research and education based in Budapest, Hungary. In 2007- 2011, Anna-Mária was a senior consultant to the Managing Multiethnic Communities Programme of LGI/Open Society Foundations and she was the director of the course “Incorporating Ethnocultural Diversity into the Teaching of Public Administration” organised by the Central European University. Prior to this, she directed the Europe Office of Minority Rights Group International (MRG) for eight years. She has also worked as the Advisor on Minority Affairs at the OSCE Mission in Kosovo and as an Advisor on International Relations to the President of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania. Anna-Mária holds an M.Sc. in Public Administration and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and a PhD in political sciences from the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Law and Political Science, Budapest, Hungary. Among others, Anna-Mária is co-editor of Diversity in Action: Local Public Management of Multi-ethnic Communities in Central and Eastern Europe (LGI/OSI, 2001) and co-author of Minority Rights Advocacy in the European Union: A Guide for NGOs in South-East Europe (MRG, London, 2006). In 2011 she co-edited with Corinne Lennox volume 18(2) of the International Journal on Minority and Group Rights on civil society contributions to the international regime of minority protection. From 2018 she is Editor-in-Chief of the series International Studies in Human Rights and Identity published by Brill/Nijhoff Academic Publishers.

Balázs Vizi, University of Public Service

Balázs Vizi dr. jur., is associate professor at the Department of International Law, Faculty of International and European Studies of the University of Public Service (Budapest). He is also research professor at the Institute for Minority Studies, Centre for Social Sciences (Budapest). He graduated in law at the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and holds a PhD in social sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven). He has specialized in international human and minority rights law. Among others, Balázs Vizi is co-editor of Research Handbook on Minority Politics in the European Union (Edward Elgar, 2022), and is a co-founding member and working group chair of COST (European Co-operation in Science and Technology) funded ENTAN (European Non-Territorial Autonomy Network) project.

Corinne Lennox, Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Dr Corinne Lennox is Co-Director of the Human Rights Consortium. She is a Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and convenes the MA in Understanding and Securing Human Rights.
Her research focuses on issues of minority and indigenous rights protection, civil society mobilisation for human rights, and human rights and development. She has worked for many years as a human rights consultant and trainer, including at Minority Rights Group International, the UNDP and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Mohammad Shahabuddin, Birmingham Law School

Mohammad Shahabuddin is a Professor of International Law & Human Rights at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham, UK. He specialises in histories and theories of international law and human rights, international law of minority protection, right to self-determination, and ethnicity, nationalism and ethnic conflicts. His teaching and research is informed by critical, postcolonial, and TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) scholarship. He has published extensively in the areas of his research specialisation. Shahab is the author of Ethnicity and International Law: Histories, Politics and Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Minorities and the Making of Postcolonial States in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021). For the latter, he received the prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2018-2020). He is also the editor of Bangladesh and International Law (Routledge, 2021). In addition to academic research, Shahab also worked for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Bangladesh as its National Consultant in 2011/12 to conduct compliance studies on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). These reports have been published by the National Human Rights Commission, Bangladesh, and used for policy reform recommendations to the government.

Fernand de Varennes, UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues

Dr Fernand de Varennes completed his law degrees in Canada (LLB, Moncton), the United Kingdom (LLM, London School of Economics and Political Science), and the Netherlands (Dr Juris, Maastricht). He is the former Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Université de Moncton (Canada), Extraordinary Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Pretoria (South Africa), and from 2019 Cheng Yu Tung Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong (China). He also holds the mandate of United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues. He is renown as one of the world’s leading experts on the international human rights of minorities with more than 200 publications in some 30 languages and has focused particularly on issues surrounding languages. He was also as Editor-in-Chief of the Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law and has worked and written in areas of international law such as the prevention of ethnic conflicts, the rights of migrants, the relationship between ethnicity, human rights and democracies.

Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua, University of Ghana

Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua is Associate Professor at the School of Law, University of Ghana, Legon, Accra where he teaches Public International Law and International Human Rights Law. He is also the representative lecturer from University of Ghana in the LL.M Programme in Human Rights and Democratisation, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Kwadwo is a member of the Ghana Bar Association. He completed his LLB at the University of Ghana, Legon and his professional law degree at the Ghana School of Law.
Thereafter, he proceeded to Dalhousie University and McGill University, both in Canada, for his LLM and DCL programmes. He was a Bank of Ireland Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland. Kwadwo recently completed his Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship at Centre for Educational Research and Development, Lincoln University, UK where he conducted a research on “Building Academic Freedom and Democracy in Africa.” He is a member of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE), USA and executive member, Jacobs-Abbey Global Institute for Leadership Studies, Woodbridge, VA, USA. Kwadwo has served as a consultant for various inter-governmental organisations and international civil society organisations such as United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on its Education for Justice (E4J) initiative; the Open Society Foundation’s Global Program on Drug Policy (GPDP) and Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA). He has recently been appointed as a board member of the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom, Central European University, Vienna, Austria.

Hani Anouti, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals

Hani Anouti is an affiliated professor at Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and a consultant for several International Organizations and INGOs. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Spain, with a special focus on minorities, authoritarian regimes, and Middle Eastern studies. He has more than 17 years of professional experience with the United Nations and INGOs throughout the Middle East and Europe with an emphasis on development, humanitarian, and human rights topics. Moreover, he has gained 10 years of academic and teaching experience across universities in Lebanon and Spain. Hani is also a political activist and advisor for some political change movements in Lebanon and he frequently contributes through his articles to diverse Lebanese, national, and Arab regional, newspapers.

Umut Özsu, Carleton University

Umut Özsu is a scholar of public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford University Press, 2015), and is currently finalizing Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He is also co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Edward Elgar, 2021) and The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 2019), as well as several journal symposia. He has published over thirty book chapters and journal articles.
Over the course of the past decade, Umut has taught thousands of BA, MA, PhD, JD, and LLM students, his courses ranging from the law of contracts through public international law and international human rights law to specialized seminars in citizenship, human rights, transitional justice, and legal and socio-legal theory. He welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students. He is especially interested in supervising students working on Marx, Marxist theory, and the history and theory of international law.

Marina Shupac, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Marina Shupac is an award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker and Human Rights practitioner from Moldova. Currently Marina works as a consultant at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) where she assists the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues in organizing regional forums and the UN Forum on Minority Issues (UNFMI). She also worked as a consultant with the OHCHR presence in Chisinau and OHCHR Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section.
Previously Marina was awarded the Senior Minority Fellowship with the UN Human Rights Office and the Sakharov Fellowship with the EU Parliament. Being inspired by the the UNFMI and the UN Fellowship for Minorities, Marina led the efforts to establish the National Minorities Youth Forum of Moldova and the Summer School for Minority Youth in Moldova. Both initiatives are now sustained by the Youth Platform of Interethnic Solidarity of Moldova which was created with Marina’s support.
Coming from an ethnic and linguistic minority background and born in the small town Bessarabca, Marina is passionate about enhancing solidarity among people from different communities.

Farah Mihlar, Oxford Brookes University

Dr. Farah Mihlar is a Sri Lankan/British academic and human rights activist. She lectures in conflict studies, human rights and transitional justice at the University of Exeter. Her PhD was on religious changes amongst Sri Lanka’s minority Muslims population during the armed conflict. Her research explored factors behind the rise in Islamic revivalism and extremism among Muslims who were not seen to be part of the country’s ethnic conflict. Her recent work has explored the interlink between these changes and the religious violence faced by Muslims at the hand of Buddhist violent extremists. Farah’s second area of research is on post-conflict justice for minority groups in Sri Lanka, particularly focusing on women. She has more recently extended this research to consider the role of religious actors in transitional justice processes in Nepal and Sri Lanka. Prior to becoming an academic, she had a long-standing career in international human rights working for the UN and INGOs, specialising in minority rights.

Priyanka Samy, National Federation of Dalit Women, India

Priyanka Samy is an intersectional feminist and an anti-caste activist from India. She is with the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW). NFDW is a grassroots network of Dalit women’s organisations in India and Priyanka is currently NFDW’s Youth Convenor. Priyanka’s work experience over the last ten years has focused on strengthening governance ecosystems at various levels, which includes policy engagement and advocacy with key stakeholders, working with women from marginalized communities, building local capacities, networking and forging strategic partnerships with relevant actors. Priyanka works closely with social justice movements and rights-based campaigns in India, such as the Feminist movement and the Dalit Human Rights movement, among others. Having worked in the development sector and with International NGOs, Priyanka has extensive programmatic, network building and resourcing/fund-raising experience. She is also currently a Board Member of FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund and is a National Gender Youth Advocate (NGYA) with UN Women, driving the Generation Equality Campaign.

Evelin Verhas, Tom Lantos Institute

Evelin Verhás is Head of Programmes at the Tom Lantos Institute since 2016. She oversees the work of the Institute in its three programme areas: Human Rights of Minorities, Jewish Life and Countering Antisemitism, and Roma Rights and Citizenship. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master’s degree in Human Rights from the London School of Economics. She has over 15 years of professional experience in the field of minority protection. Evelin started her career as a volunteer at Minority Rights Group Europe (Budapest) in 2006, followed by an internship at Amnesty International’s International Secretariat in London. From 2010 to September 2016, she worked in the conflict prevention and the legal team of Minority Rights Group International (MRG) in London. She was responsible for implementing minority rights advocacy and legal programmes in Europe, South-East Asia, East-Africa, Middle East and North Africa. A key part of her work focused on the implementation of the landmark Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, addressing constitutionally entrenched discrimination against minorities. She authored the briefing Collateral Damage of the Dayton Peace Agreement: Discrimination Against Minorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Twenty Years On (MRG, 2015) and the report The Turkish Minority in Western Thrace: The Long Struggle for Rights and Recognition (MRG, 2019). She served as managing editor of a number of publications pertaining to minority issues, including Populism, Memory and Minority Rights: Central and Eastern European Issues in Global Perspective (Brill/Nijhoff, 2018) and Roma Resistance During the Holocaust and in its Aftermath: Collection of Working Papers (Tom Lantos Institute, 2018), and Survey on Antisemitic Prejudice in the Visegrád Countries (Tom Lantos Institute, 2022).

Cathal Doyle

Dr Cathal Doyle is a Leverhulme Trust research fellow at Middlesex University London School of Law. He has published a range of books, chapters, articles, reports and other materials in the area of indigenous peoples’ rights, as well as acting as an advocate on behalf of indigenous groups and a researcher with the Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, among other advocacy roles. His books include Indigenous Peoples, Title to Territory, Rights and Resources: The Transformative Role of Free Prior and Informed Consent (Routledge, 2015) and Business and Human Rights: Indigenous Peoples’ Experiences with Access to Remedy: Case studies from Africa, Asia and Latin America (International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2015).

Esther Ojulari, Human Rights and Racial Justice Activist, Regional Coordinator-CODHES Colombia (TBC)

Noémi Nagy, University of Public Service
Dr. Noémi Nagy is Associate Professor at the Department of International Law, University of Public Service (Budapest, Hungary) and guest lecturer at the Department of Legal History, Faculty of Law, University of Pécs (Hungary). She holds a PhD in law as well as university degrees in law and psychology. From 2010 to 2014 she was research fellow at the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in the 2014/2015 academic year she was doctoral research fellow at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central-European Studies, University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). Her main research interests are language rights, minority rights and the international protection of human rights. She also teaches courses in the fields of international organizations and general issues of international law. She gave academic lectures in several countries in Europe as well as Canada and the U.S. She is author of 70 publications including English-language articles in high ranking academic journals and two Hungarian-language monographs (Language of Power – Power of Language: Language Legislation and Language Policy in the History of Europe; Self-Restrained Constitutional Justice – The Protection of Nationalities by the Constitutional Court of Hungary).

Cayetano Fernandez, Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra

Cayetano is a junior researcher at Center for Social Studies (CES), currently integrated in the project POLITICS – The politics of anti-racism in Europe and Latin America: knowledge production, decision-making and collective struggles, particularly in the research stream “Cultures of Scholarship and State Universities: the study of racism and (post)colonialism in higher education”. In collaboration with the University of Granada (Spain) and other entities he has been working in several researches related to Roma in different fields, as access to education of Kale community, Roma migration process from eastern to Western Europe, the historical role of Roma involved in the Spanish Civil War, and the contemporary status of Kale language as political identity builder among Spanish Roma. Currently he is enrolled in the PhD Program ´Human Rights in Contemporary Societies´ at the University of Coimbra and his research topic is focused on Racism in Academia, particularly, in anti-gypsism produced in the field of the so-called Romani Studies. Previously, as a research fellow, he has conducted research in the Native American Studies department of Montana State University (USA) and as doctoral fellow in the department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University (Hungary). Currently, he is part of the Roma Decolonial organization Kale Amenge, a project which aims to link knowledge production on Roma and advocacy.

Ildiko Török, Tom Lantos Institute

Ildikó Török started working at the Tom Lantos Institute as a Programme Manager for Roma Rights and Citizenship in August 2017. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Social Studies at Eötvös Loránd University and her Master’s degree in Public Policy from the Central European University, where her research focused on the complex policy measures to prevent early dropout of Roma girls in Hungary. She also studied Minority Politics at Eötvös Loránd University and attended tutoring classes in Public Policy and Nationalism Studies at the Roma Access Programs.

Ildikó gained professional experience at the Ministry of Human Capacities. She worked at the State Secretariat for Social Inclusion, where she was involved in the implementation process of the National Social Inclusion Strategy, seeking opportunities to work on Roma policy issues, especially with regard to Roma youth and women. Working at the State Secretariat for International Affairs, she was responsible for Roma issues in relation to the European Union, the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Ildikó is interested in the tools of further developing the participation of Roma women, particularly in decision-making bodies, as well as improving the level of leadership skills among the