Centre of Excellence Human Rights

What is a Centre of Excellence?

A Centre of Excellence is a facility that provides best practice and knowledge around a particular area. Our Centres of Excellence offer you the opportunity to study your chosen law specialism with dedicated support from our expert lecturers. You’ll benefit from their knowledge and experience in within human rights.

Across our different Centres of Excellence, we work with governing bodies and provide specialist modules and electives that allow you to shape your studies to meet your career needs.

The Centre of Excellence for Human Rights is based within our Birmingham campus primarily due to faculty experience, associated interests and research, and connections to industry in judicial review, human rights and related immigration practice.

Students of our Birmingham campus will be provided with membership of the Birmingham Law Society. However, you can also study our human rights programmes at our London Bloomsbury, Manchester and Online campuses.

What is Human Rights Law?

The United Nations defines human rights as “rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status.” As a concept, human rights is subject to many potential definitions and what’s included within its scope is contested. For example, whether groups of people can be subject to human rights and in what way, or what kinds of rights count as human rights, has significant implications for the function of rights globally.

Within our programme, we consider a range of prominent ideas about what rights are, their coherence, and what this means for the law in application. Students who want to get the most direct exposure to human rights are encouraged to take our recommended modules, but since human rights is highly multi-disciplinary and overlaps with so many other areas, you can tailor your studies to your area of interest or career aspirations through a wide range of elective modules.

Students may choose to consider careers in judicial review or immigration practice, but if a particular aspect of human rights is especially important to you then you may wish to develop a career in that area inside or outside of law. For example, you could choose to work for a relevant charity or NGO, both locally or globally.

The named programmes we offer within human rights are:

• LLM International Human Rights
• LLM International Criminal Law
• LLM Public International Law
• LLM Immigration Law

Industry connections

Many of our faculty members and industry connections are recognised experts in the field, conducting cutting-edge research and engaging with industry leaders to shape the direction of policy and law.

Dan Weston – Module Designer, International Human Rights

Dan’s interest in free speech combined with analytical philosophy and conceptual analysis in law lead to the natural progression of investigating human rights. His work explores the distinction between speech and conduct from a regulatory perspective, and the justifications for free speech and when it is most important.

Dan completed his PhD at the University of Leicester, investigating the application of the philosophy of language to aid our understanding on legal concepts. His work focused on issues in free speech law via “speech act theory”. He is also a published academic, having his articles featured in the International Journal of Language and Law and the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law.

Want to hear from our lecturers?

Our lecturers have delivered a range of research seminars, including “Categorical Analysis and Proportionality in Judicial Reasoning”, “A Case Study on the Breach of International Law and its Consequences”, “Is it Time for an Entrenched Constitutional Amendment Procedure and, if so, can it be Legally Enforceable?” and “Without Fear or Favour: The Importance of Legitimacy Within Policing and the Criminal Justice System”.