Liora Lazarus

Summary

Righting Security or Securitizing Rights

There is an entrenched popular opposition between security on the one hand, and human rights, the rule of law and liberal democracy on the other. This lecture will challenge this opposition, and will reflect on political attempts to reconcile these values, while also warning about the danger of securitising rights, the rule of law and democracy in the process.  

Biography

Liora Lazarus is an Associate Professor in Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford.

Born and raised in South Africa, she studied at the University of Cape Town, the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford. She was a Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg, Germany, before her current position at the University of Oxford. She is the author of a number of academic books and articles, including Contrasting Prisoners Rights (Oxford University Press 2004), Security and Human Rights (Hart 2007) and Reasoning Rights (2014). She has also completed a number of public reports, for the UK Ministry of Justice on balancing security and human rights, the UK Stern Review into the treatment of Rape Complaints, and the European Union Parliament on the genesis of existing human rights frameworks.

Professor Lazarus is an Associate Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub, and is actively involved in the work of Oxford Pro Bono Publico (which she co-founded). She is the book review editor of the European Human Rights Law Review, and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Human Rights Practice. She is also on the Advisory Board of Oxford's Centre for Ethics and Law in Armed Conflict.

Professor Lazarus is currently working on two monographs for Hart Publishing entitled Securing Legality and Juridifying Security, the work on these are funded by the British Academy and the Oxford Martin Programme on Human Rights for Future Generations.