Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law

The Oppenheimer Chair, endowed in 2006, has been created through the generous support of Dr Tamar Oppenheimer, a former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and an alumnus of our university, in order to bring a leading scholar and teacher in the field of public international law to the Faculty.

The purpose of the Chair is to reinforce a Canadian locus for the study and research of international law, with particular attention to the relationship between international legal obligations and domestic law.

Through his engagement in teaching and research in public international law, the chairholder will advance the understanding of theoretical and practical dimensions of the implementation of international treaty, customary and other obligations in domestic law with due regard to the constitutional setting in federal and unitary states.

Members

Holder of the Chair

François Crépeau holds the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law and is Hans & Tamar Professor in International Law at the Faculty of Law of McGill University.

Coordinator

Edit Frenyó coordinates the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law.

Research Associates

Rosa da Costa works on issues concerning international human rights, refugee law and international displacement, gender, humanitarian cooperation, security, governance, and ethics in international relations

Idil Atak is assistant professor at Ryerson University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology.

Donald Boucher is a social worker and a psychotherapist clinician for asylum seekers who were victims of organized violence.

Janet Cleveland is a psychologist, legal scholar and anthropologist who studies various aspects of the refugee status determination process in Canada, the situation of psychologically vulnerable persons, and the detention of asylum seekers.

Filippo Furi is a Phd candidate in Anthropology at the University of Montreal: his research are dedicated to the notion of city of asylum, focusing on the politics and the practices of hospitality towards asylum seekers in Italy and particulary in the city of Venice.

Rodziana Mohamed Razali Steinberg Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University Faculty of Law (2018-19) is an expert on statelessness in the ASEAN Member States, researching birth registration and legal identity. She is now a senior lecturer at the Islamic Science University of Malaysia, an Advocate and Solicitor of the High Court of Malaya (Non-practicing) and a member of Statelessness Network Asia Pacific (SNAP).

Edit Frenyó a post-doctoral Global Fellow affiliated with NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (2020 – ) and a former Steinberg Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University Faculty of Law (2018 – 2020), works in the areas of transnational family law, migration studies, labor and human rights. Her research explores the contemporary phenomena of transnational families and the multiple challenges to childcare faced by families of labor migrants.

Anne-Claire Gayet is a lawyer at the Quebec Bar, holds a Masters in International Studies and a LL.M in international law from the University of Montreal.

Bethany Hastie is a DCL student at McGill University. She is currently researching issues of human trafficking for labour exploitation under Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Programs.

Hala Soubra Itani holds a PhD from the Institut d’Études Politiques of Grenoble and St Jospeh University in Beyrouth. Her main work and research interests include international organisations, in particular related to refugee and migration issues.

Kinga Janik‘s main research interests include refugee law, humanitarian cooperation, security and governance.

Estibaliz Jimenez is professor at the Department of psychoeducation at l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR).

Noura Karazivan is a professor at the University of Montreal. She is doing research of the territorial reach on the protection of human rights in Canada.

Karine Mac Allister is a Ph.D student at the University of Montreal. She is doing research on the international standards applicable to population transfers.

Benoit Mayer is Associate Professor at the International Law Institute and the Environmental Law Institute of Wuhan University (China). His research focuses in particular on the relations between climate change and human mobility.

Delphine Nakache is Professor at the School of International Development and Globalisation of the University of Ottawa. She teaches international public law and immigration and refugee law.

Christian Peterson is a filmmaker and photographer whose main research topic is the link between cinema, photography and architecture, and the expression of personal and collective memory through the built environment.

Michel Peterson is a psychoanalyst, social worker and professor of literature. He is also a clinician for asylum seekers who were victims of organized violence, and has written books and articles on the subject.

Michel Girard works in visual arts. His approach focuses on issues related to marginality and exclusion.

Victor Piché is a sociologist and a demographer specialized in international migrations. Honorary Professor of the University of Montreal, he now works specifically on migrant workers’ rights.

Anna Lise Purkey is the 2015-2016 Gordon F. Henderson Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa. She works on the role of refugees in the diverse post-conflict transitional justice processes.

Aranzazu Recalde is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law, where she teaches and conducts research on the increasing participation of migrant women in the “transnational care industry” along with the emotional and socio-economic implications that it brings about for these women and their families.

Hanna Haile is a researcher and a visiting fellow at the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. Her research and writing interests lie in the fields of international human rights, migration, sustainability and intellectual property law. Her current project explores the experiences of Eritrean asylum seekers and refugees within the Canadian Legal System.

Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko is a Lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights (ICHR), School of Law, National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research interests include human rights with a particular emphasis on the international protection of women’s rights, relationship between Islam and human rights protection, international refugee and migration law, comparative law and legal cultures, feminist analyses of law, law and humanities.

Rouba Al-Salem is a human rights consultant based in Montreal. She holds a PhD in law from Université de Montréal. Her research interests focus on issues of human rights, and international humanitarian law as it relates to the Middle East and on the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Canada. From 2017-2018 she was a Steinberg Fellow in International Migration Law and Policy at the faculty of Law, McGill University.