International Human Rights Law

Overview

The University of Oxford's Master's in International Human Rights Law is a part-time degree offered over two academic years, involving a combination of distance learning and summer residentials. It is offered jointly by the Department for Continuing Education and the Faculty of Law.

The course is designed in particular for lawyers as well as other (non-law) human rights advocates who wish to pursue advanced studies in international human rights law but may need to do so alongside work and/or care responsibilities. The course aims to develop an understanding of the principles and institutions of international human rights law, including their origins, assumptions, contents, limits and potential.

It encourages students to think analytically about the implementation and development of international human rights law, to conduct research, and to apply this body of law in their own professional setting and context. The course thus puts equal emphasis on the theory, doctrine and practice of human rights law.

The programme offers an invaluable opportunity to be a part of a vibrant and diverse community of human rights scholars and practitioners from over 90 countries around the world. It provides an institutional framework for cross-national and cross-sectoral professional collaborations and exchange of information within the human rights discourse.

Graduate destinations

Students have gone on to work as prosecutors and defence lawyers at the International Criminal Court, other UN criminal tribunals, and the European and Inter-American Human Rights Courts. They work in private and multi-national corporate practice; in various ministries in their national governments and as UN officials ranging from refugee legal protection officers to country representatives. Others are judges, university professors, lawyers with their national armed forces, heads of NGOs and journalists.

Graduates from the course also include economists, obstetricians, epidemiologists, psychiatrists and forensic anthropologists. They are advisors in the White House, the Australian Foreign Ministry, the German Defence Ministry and the EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs. They are defence counsel at Guantanamo Bay, do front-line community work in Afghanistan and emergency co-ordination in Sudan, Haiti and many other places. They represent indigenous peoples in northern Canada, Western Australia, the Philippines and Brazil.