Visiting Scholars
The Centre hosts annually a number of academics and graduate students from other universities as Visiting Scholars. Scholars are provided with a base and facilities to conduct their own human rights research. They are welcome to attend centre conferences, lectures and other activities during their stay.
For further details, please contact hrlc@nottingham.ac.uk to whom applications for admission as a Visiting Scholar should also be made. You can find out more about current and previous visiting scholars below.
2024
Dr Ahmed Almutawa is a police officer and a member of academic staff at the Royal Academy of Police, Kingdom of Bahrain. In 2020, he was awarded a PhD from the University of Leeds for a thesis that examined the legitimacy of counterterrorist financing in Bahrain. Since then, he has worked on developing a research interest in international human rights law.
Dr Almutawa has participated in several conferences and delivered seminars in Bahrain, the UK and overseas in the area of human rights law and counter terrorism. His work has been published in leading journals in the field, such as the Human Rights Law Review, Public Law, Journal of Human Rights Practice, and the European Human Rights Law Review, amongst others. In 2022, along with co-author Hajer Almanea, he was awarded the Kamran Arif Annual award for ‘best article of the year’ by the editors of the Asian Yearbook of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. The paper, which was published in the 2022 Yearbook (volume 6), examines the noncompliance of national legislation with the Arab Charter of Human Rights.
His current research is focused on the regional protection of human rights. With Professor Konstantinos Magliveras, he is co-editing a book for Asser Press (Springer) that uses legitimacy as the theme for a comparative analysis of the institutional aspects of regional human rights systems. He is also working on a proposal for a book that will consider the role and future of regional human rights protection. During his time at the HRLC, he will be working on a paper that considers some of the lessons for regional human rights protection that may be learned from the experiences of the European Court of Human Rights.
2021
Gunnar Theissen is a Human Rights Officer at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights supporting the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing. An expert on economic, social and cultural rights and transitional justice, he holds an LLM in international human rights law from the University of the Western Cape and a political science degree from the Free University of Berlin.
His research at the HRLC, undertaken in the context of the UN sabbatical leave programme 2021, was aimed at developing a guide on homelessness and human rights. The guide is one of the first publications to set out the human rights standards related to homelessness as enshrined in international and regional human rights law and reaffirmed by the jurisprudence of human rights bodies and UN resolutions and declarations. It is intended for government officials; judges and lawyers; policy makers; social, health and humanitarian workers; law enforcement officials; housing and social service providers and persons experiencing homelessness.
2018
Ceren Sedef Eren is an Assistant Rapporteur Judge in the Constitutional Court of Turkey since 2014. She graduated from the University of Ankara Law School and undertook her LLM in human rights law at the University of Kent Brussels School of International Studies.
She was sponsored by the Council of Europe and conducted research on freedom of expression and fighting terrorism in the context of the crime to be a member of a terrorist organisation.
2017
Dr Ihsan Basturk joined the HRLC as a visiting scholar from October - November 2017. Dr Basturk is a judge on the Turkish Court of Cassation. He was sponsored by the Council of Europe and conducted research on human rights protection in Turkey's domestic judicial system.
2014/15
Professor Vitor Blotta is Professor of Law and Ethics of Journalism and Publishing, University of São Paulo. Professor Blotta joined the HRLC as a visiting scholar from December 2014 - January 2015. Whilst in Nottingham, Professor Blotta, under the supervision of HRLC Co-Director Professor Dominic McGoldrick, worked on a research project entitled, 'Privacies in Public: on the legitimacy of privacy and freedom of information in Brazil and England - Public debates on the regulation of Brazilian Internet and the Leveson Inquiry'.
2013/14
Professor Yuejun Guo is from the East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai. From August 2013 - August 2014 he was a visiting scholar at HRLC. Whilst at the HRLC Professor Guo conducted two research projects:
- Implementation mechanisms of international law related to economic, social and cultural rights (sponsored by the Chinese National Social Sciences Fund); and
- The Optional Protocol to the ICESCR and China (sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Education).
Explore previous visiting scholars here.