Menu Close
Director, Human Rights Centre, PI and Co-Director, ESRC Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Large Grant, University of Essex

Lorna McGregor is a Professor in the Law School and Director of the Human Rights Centre. She researches and teaches in the areas of public international law, particularly international human rights law. Her work has appeared in journals such as the American Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the Journal of International Criminal Justice and the International Journal of Transitional Justice and has been cited by the UK House of Lords and International Court of Justice. In 2015, Lorna was awarded the Antonio Cassese Prize for International Criminal Law Studies.

She is the Principal Investigator and Co-Director of an ESRC Large Grant (£5 million) on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology; the Principal Investigator of a Nuffield-funded project on the role of National Human Rights Institutions in Complaints-Handling; a Co-Investigator on an ESRC-funded project on Utilising Big Data in the Practice of Torture Survivors' Rehabilitation and a Co-Investigator on a British Academy Newton Fund grant on The Effects of International Human Rights Law on Public International Law and its Sub-Branches.

Lorna is a Co-Chair of the International Law Association's Study Group on Individual Responsibility in International Law, a Contributing Editor of EJIL Talk!, a Commissioner of the British Equality and Human Rights Commission and a member of REDRESS Legal Advisory Council. Between 2012 - 2015, she was a co-chair of an expert group of academics and human rights practitioners on the review of the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and was an independent expert at the UN Intergovernmental Expert Meeting on the review of the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners in Argentina in December 2012.

Prior to joining the Law School, Lorna worked for REDRESS, the International Bar Association and the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Sri Lanka. Lorna holds an LL.B (First Class Honours) from Edinburgh Law School and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, where she was a Kennedy Memorial Trust Scholar and Henigson Fellow. She is admitted as an attorney in New York State.

Experience

  • –present
    Director, Human Rights Centre, University of Essex