Postgraduate Research Students
Olivia Barr
Thesis: Geographies of Jurisdiction: Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Common Law in Australia
Supervisors: Jenny Beard and Maureen Tehan
Olivia Barr graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Laws (Dist) and a Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology) before graduating from the University of British Columbia with a Master of Laws. Olivia has worked in law reform, as a government solicitor and for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Her doctoral thesis contemplates the role of jurisdiction in locating and placing the common law through the utilisation of critical approaches to jurisdiction and critical legal geography.
Meg Brodie
Thesis: Agents of Change: What power do national human rights institutions have to affect the process of transformative social change?
Supervisors: Dianne Otto, John Chesterman and Brian Burdekin (external)
Meg Brodie completed a BA(Hons)/LLB(Hons) at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD investigates national inquiries conducted by the National Human Rights Commissions of Mongolia and India. Her fieldwork was supported by an Endeavour Research Fellowship. A lawyer, Meg has worked in both the corporate and not-for-profit sectors and currently sits on the Board of the Oaktree Foundation. In 2009 Meg will take up a Teaching Fellowship at the Law School.
Takele Soboka Bulto
Thesis: The Imperatives of Extraterritorial Application of the Human Right to Water: A Case Study of the Nile Basin
Supervisors: Carolyn Evans and Jacqueline Peel
Takele Soboka Bulto, (Ethiopia) holds LLB and MA degrees from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and an LLM degree from University of Pretoria, South Africa. Takele worked as a judge and lecturer in Ethiopia and a visiting lecturer at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. He also worked as Programme Coordinator for Child Rights and Child Rights Programming in Eastern and Central African Regional Office of Save the Children Sweden. Just before taking up his PhD studies at Melbourne Law School Takele was a Legal Officer in a PanAfrican Pioneer NGO, Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa, where he practiced before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. He represented victims on human rights violations from Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Kenya and Angola and defended their cases before the two African regional human rights bodies.
Takele has published his works in American, South African and Ethiopian Journals. His most recent works entitled ‘Between Ambivalence and Necessity: Occlusions on the Path Towards A Basin-Wide Treaty in the Nile Basin’ and ‘The Interplay of the Equality Clause and Affirmative Action Measures under the Ethiopian Constitution: The Benishangul Gumuz Case and Beyond’ are forthcoming in 20 (1) Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy(2008) and 2 Ethiopian Human Rights Law Review (2008), respectively.
His PhD thesis analyses the operationalisation of the emerging human right to water in Africa. Given that every single African state has at least one water source to share with another state, the realisation of the human right to water in Africa is primarily dependent upon resources that cross international borders of states that rely on the same resource to fulfil the human right to water in their respective territories. Many states lack the necessary water resources from within their territories, and found themselves under resource constraints that would severely hamper their ability to ‘respect’, ‘protect,’ ‘promote’ and ‘fulfil’ the human rights of their inhabitants. Taking the Nile Basin as a case study, Takele’s thesis seeks to explore riparian states’ extraterritorial legal obligations in the fulfilment of a human right to water of the populations living beyond their own borders.
Luis Eslava
Thesis: Spatial Dimensions of Law and Development: Transforming sovereignty, state and citizenship
Supervisor: Jennifer Beard and Anne Orford
Luis Eslava completed his undergraduate law degree at Universidad Externado de Colombia and a Master of Law and Development at the Melbourne Law School. Luis is interested in issues of Global Governance, from the perspective of critical Third World subjects. In the last few years, Luis has published various articles in Colombian and international journals, including 'Corporate Social Responsibility & Development: A knot of disempowerment' in Sortuz - Oñati Journal of Emergent Sociolegal Studies; 'Occupation Law: (Mis)Use and Consequences in Iraq' in Contexto and a review of 'Developing Power:
How Women Transformed International Development' for Feminist Legal Studies.
Luis' PhD project investigates the implications of the decentralization of development in Colombia since the reform of the Colombian Constitution in 1991. It specifically asks what have been the effects of the move from national to local development on the juridico-political concepts of sovereignty, state and citizenship. It suggests that these reforms altered the geographical space in which development was usually conceived and performed as part of an international trend that portrays States as overgrown and unmanageable spaces. The effect was the creation of multiple sub-national territorial units, which overtook the nation-state and its citizens as the preferred sites of development interventions. To evaluate this development shift, the research adopts a case-based approach focusing on Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia.
Carolyn Graydon
Thesis: Domestic Violence in Timor-Leste: Is There a Place for Indigenous Justice Systems?
Supervisors: Tim Lindsey and Dianne Otto
Carolyn worked as an advocate in the area of refugee and immigration law for several years and then with the United Nations in Timor-Leste as a human rights officer. This experience triggered her interest in Timorese women’s responses to gender violence, more particularly their use of formal and indigenous justice systems. Carolyn’s thesis focuses on indigenous processes of developing and protecting human rights, more specifically, justice processes and their potential for long term transformation so that they are better able to deliver the justice and protection sought by Timorese women. In 2006 and 2007 she lectured at Melbourne University in the subject Law and Society in Southeast Asia.
Lia Kent
Thesis: Exploring Expectations of Transitional Justice in Timor Leste
Supervisors: Dianne Otto, Jennifer Balint and Julie Evans
Lia holds a BA and a MPubIntLaw (University of Melbourne) and a MSW (Latrobe). Her fields of interest include postconflict reconstruction, transitional justice and reconciliation. Lia has worked in the field of human rights and development for over ten years, in Australia and East Timor, including for non-government and intergovernmental organisations such as Oxfam and the United Nations. Lia is currently in the second year of her PhD which considers the transitional justice processes undertaken in East Timor during the period of United Nations Administration, and, in particular, the differing expectations of transitional justice held by international, national and local actors. The project aims to reflect critically on the adequacy of transitional justice models for dealing with the complex and long-term needs of societies emerging from periods of conflict.
Eve Lester
Thesis: Making migration law work in Australia: paradoxes and prospects
Supervisor: Jennifer Beard and Shaun McVeigh
The central question of my thesis asks which historical dynamics have shaped immigration law-making in Australia so as to circumscribe enjoyment of basic social and economic rights, and pivotally the right to work, by people who migrate as part of a survival strategy. To this end, my thesis analyses the influence of a matrix of societal dynamics, including the concept of sovereignty, race, religion and political economy and their role in shaping social and economic rights and realities for survival migrants in Australia.
Daniel Muriu
Thesis: Recognition, Redistribution and Resistance: Assessing the Usefulness of Human Rights in the Task of Realising Better Health in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Context of Challenges Posed by International Economic Actors
Supervisors: Anne Orford and Jennifer Beard
Daniel Muriu is a PhD candidate in the Melbourne Law School. Daniel’s thesis examines the usefulness of human rights as a strategy for realising or ensuring better health in Africa especially in the context of the pervasive power of international economic institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Using insights from Third World Approaches to International Law and the writings of Michel Foucault, he argues for a conceptualisation of human rights that recognizes the limits of human rights as instruments of recognition, resistance and redistribution particularly in the light of the activities of the aforesaid non-state actors.
Daniel completed his LLB with Honours at the University of Nairobi, Kenya in 1992 and his LLM with distinction at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2002. A research paper Daniel submitted as part of his LLM, Paying Lip Service to the Principles of Regulation: A Comparative Critique of the Telecommunications Laws of Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Ghana, Cameroon and Sri Lanka, was published in the Journal of African Law, University of London in 2002. Prior to commencing his doctoral studies at Melbourne, Daniel was a partner at Hamilton Harrison and Mathews, which is the oldest and largest law firm in Kenya, offering a full range of legal services to both local and international clients. His specialisations in legal practice have been in corporate, commercial, banking and intellectual property law amongst others. Since 1997, he has also worked on a pro bono basis for human rights organisations providing legal aid to women and children in Kenya and was a founder member and trustee of the Child Rights, Advocacy and Documentation Legal Centre (CRADLE) which is the foremost children rights organisation in Kenya.
Edward Mussawir
Thesis: Jurisdiction: The Expression and Representation of Law
Supervisors: Peter Rush and Anne Orford
Edward has taught in the Melbourne Law School and in the Criminology department at the University of Melbourne and is currently completing a doctoral thesis addressing the place that various models of jurisdiction have had within a Western tradition of jurisprudence. His research focus is concerned with the jurisdictions of personality, possession and procedure. Drawing a theoretical influence from Gilles Deleuze, Edward has been interested in finding ways of addressing an expressive genre in jurisprudence. He has published in such journals as Law and Literature, The Australian Feminist Law Journal and Studies in Law, Politics and Society on themes ranging from Franz Kafka to law and cinematic representation. Other topics within Edward’s academic interest include issues of jurisdiction relating to animal law, terror-related procedures of control and the sexuate legal personality of children.
Yoriko Otomo
Thesis: The Changing Landscapes of Risk: A Feminist Jurisprudence of the International Law of Occupation and International Economic Law
Supervisors: Anne Orford and Jenny Beard
Yoriko Otomo has worked in several government and non-government environmental organisations, and has contributed to publications relating to sustainable development, environmental law and humanitarian issues. Her doctoral thesis seeks to develop a semiology of law through a poststructural feminist analysis of key texts within the law of occupation and international economic law.
Mickaël Ho Foui Sang
Thesis: The Functions of Law in the Protection of Historical Truth
Supervisors: Anne Orford
Mickaël Ho Foui Sang is a PhD candidate at Melbourne Law School. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas, France). Mickaël holds a Masters degree in Theory and Analysis of the Law and a degree in European Law from the University of Paris X (Nanterre, France). His Masters theses focused on the interaction of legal systems, especially on ways to rethink French private law in the context of European integration, both from a substantial and from a procedural law point of view. Mickaël is particularly interested in the tension between the State, collective memory and history in contemporary France and Australia. His research thesis explores the place and function of law in the process of reconciliation and the recognition of historical truth.
Olivera Simic
Thesis: Is the zero tolerance approach to sex between UN peacekeeping personnel and local people in the context of UN peacekeeping operations the best way to prevent “sexual exploitation” in the future?
Supervisors: Dianne Otto and Michelle Foster
Olivera Simic has an LLM in International Human Rights Law (Essex University, UK) and MA in Gender and Peacebuilding (UN University for Peace, Costa Rica). For more than a decade she has been working as Gender and Law Consultant for different agencies (UNICEF, OSCE, ICMPD etc). Also, she has been actively engaged with projects related to women’s and children’s human rights in different capacities (activist, researcher, trainer, tutor, lecturer). Her fields of interests are gender, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, organized crime, militarism, war, peacekeeping, reconciliation.
Her thesis argues that, although the zero tolerance policy should be welcomed as the first important step towards comprehensive recognition of the problem of “sexual exploitation” in the UN peacekeeping context, the policy is not only problematic because of its broad definition of “sexual exploitation”, but for several other reasons as well. In her thesis she examines why and how the zero tolerance policy was tailored as well as what assumptions it makes, in particular about the people with whom it is most concerned. Her thesis aims to explain bewilderment about the zero tolerance policy’s broadly defined term of “sexual exploitation”. Search for the identification of the fine line between coerced sex and different layers of consensual sex lies at the heart of her research project.
John Tobin
Thesis: Between Apology and Utopia: An attempt to map out the content of the right to health under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
Supervisors: Anne Orford and Philip Alston
It has been said that ‘one would be hard pressed to find a more controversial or nebulous human right than the “the right to health”’which ‘is characterised by conceptual confusion as well as a lack of effective implementation’.The aim of this thesis is to examine the extent to which clarity can be brought to the content of the obligations which States parties have assumed under article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Deborah Whitehall
Title: Hannah Arendt, reproductive rights and the legal discourse between body politics
Supervisors: Anne Orford and Ann Genovese
Deborah's research uses the work of Hannah Arendt as a resource for reworking familiar metaphors of human rights in ways that reveal the transformative potential of Law. She is particularly interested in how social and political theory can be used to generate questions about women's reproductive rights that reset the framework in which the options for reform might be considered. Deborah's project reflects her ongoing interest in the tensions between rights discourse in international human rights law and national law and the political and social trajectories in which human rights are given substance. Deborah has studied and taught law in Australia and the United Kingdom, and has experience in law reform, and as a solicitor in the public and private sectors.