Prof. Helen Duffy
Helen Duffy runs an international legal practice, ‘Human Rights in Practice,’ and is Gieskes Chair of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Grotius Centre of the University of Leiden. Her areas of specialisation in her academic and practical work include terrorism, security and rule of law. Her practice engages in strategic human rights litigation and she has litigated groundbreaking cases in the European, African and Inter-American regional systems and before international and national courts and bodies. Cases address a broad range of rule of law issues such as CIA rendition and torture (e.g. Abu Zubaydah v Poland/Lithuania), terrorism prosecutions (e.g. Sabbeh v Egypt), judicial independence (Garzon v Spain), slavery or trafficking (e.g. Mani v Niger) and genocide (e.g. Plan de Sanchez v Guatemala). Before setting up her own practice in 2011 she was Legal Director of INTERIGHTS, and prior positions include Legal Director of the Centro para Accion Legal en Derechos Humanos Guatemala, Counsel to Human Rights Watch, and Legal Officer International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Her books and publications include ‘The War on Terror on the Framework of International law (2nd ed., Cambridge, 2015.)
In 2014, Theresa May, then Home Secretary, presented to Parliament a series of Impact Assessments examining the benefits for the United Kingdom of continuing its participation within the European Union’s security and policing arrangements such as Europol, the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) and the second generation Schengen Information System (SIS II). The conclusions reached were […]
Over the course of recent weeks, the Islamic State (IS) announced that it had established a new province in India, the wilayah of Hind, after attacks on security forces in the Kashmir region. IS has also been responsible for an uptick of attacks in Pakistan under the auspices of the wilayah of Pakistan. The attacks […]
When troops of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” conquered areas of northern Iraq in August 2014, they turned against the religious minorities in the region, particularly against the Yazidis, with extreme brutality. Many men were executed; women and children were kidnapped and often systematically raped. IS specifically targeted children and adolescents, who were torn away from […]