Human Rights Research Network

Marie Bénédicte Dembour

Marie-Bénédicte Dembour is Professor of Law and Anthropology at Ghent University. She is the Principal Investigator of the five-year ERC Advanced Grant research project ‘DISSECT: Evidence in International Human Rights Adjudication’ (2020-2025). She is a member of Ghent University’s Human Rights Centre and Human Rights Research Network. She studied Law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (1980-1985) and Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford (MPhil 1987, DPhil 1993). Her first academic appointment was as Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex (1991). There she became Professor of Law and Anthropology (2005), a title she kept as she moved first to the University of Brighton (2013) and then to the University of Ghent (2019). She is the author of three monographs: Recalling the Belgian Congo Conversations and Introspection (Berghahn, 2000), Who Believes in Human Rights? Reflections on the European Convention (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and the award-winning When Humans Become Migrants: Study of the European Court of Human Rights with an Inter-American Counterpoint (Oxford University Press, 2015). She has also co-edited three edited collections and one special issue: Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (with Jane K. Cowan and Richard A. Wilson – Cambridge University Press, 2001), Paths to International Justice: Social and Legal Perspectives (with Tobias Kelly, Cambridge University Press, 2007), Are Human Rights for Migrants? Critical Reflections on the Status of Irregular Migrants in Europe and the United States (with Tobias Kelly, Routledge, 2011), and an issue of the London Review of International Law devoted to ‘Trade +’ (with Neil Stammers, 2018). In 2010, she published the article ‘What are human rights? Four schools of thought’ in Human Rights Quarterly. It immediately became one of the most downloaded articles of this journal and continues to be taught in many human rights courses around the world.

 

Marie Bénédicte Dembour