Prof. Dr. LIORA LAZARUS

Professor in Law. University of Oxford

Liora Lazarus, BA (UCT), LLB (LSE), DPhil (Oxon), is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her primary research interests are in comparative human rights, security and human rights, comparative theory and comparative criminal justice. Born and raised in South Africa, she studied African Economic History at the University of Cape Town and Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

From 1994-95 she was a Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg, Germany. She came to Oxford in 1995 to write her doctorate at Balliol College, after which she went on to become a law fellow at St Anne’s College. Liora’s various academic publications are in the area of prisoners’ rights, criminal justice and security and human rights.

She has completed two public reports for the UK Ministry of Justice on balancing public protection with human rights, and on the relationship between rights and responsibilities. She also produced a report, with Oxford colleagues, on the evolution of fundamental rights for the European Union Parliament. She has acted as an advisor to the UK Stern Review on Rape Complaints (2013), was asked to give evidence to the Parliamentary Modern Slavery Bill Committee (2014), and was part of an International Committee of Experts to the Basque Working Group on Treatment of Political Detainees (2014).

Liora co-founded and is actively involved in the work of Oxford Pro Bono Publico, and she has supervised a range of their reports. She is also an Associate of the Oxford Human Rights Hub. Liora is an Academic Affiliate of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford and a Member of Oxford’s Centre for Criminological Research. She sits on the the Advisory Board of the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law. Liora founded and acts as the Series editor for the Hart Studies in Security and Justice.

  • Thursday, 8 November

    SESSION 2. THE CHALLENGE OF TERRORISM FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW

  • 09:00  - 10:00
    Human Rights and Insecurity: can the human rights paradigm survive?
    Prof. Dr. LIORA LAZARUS
    Super-terrorism has ruptured the liberal consensus that underpins the international order between security and human rights. In the Global North, fear of terrorism outstrips the objective risk that it represents. Instead, it has generated a culture of risk aversion and a politics of fear. The threat of terrorist attack now constitutes the premise upon which political intolerance is legitimised. It is also the main political device through which emerging populist governments consolidate power: through hyperinflation of the threat of terrorism and exploitation of the generated fear. Illiberal governments brand human rights defenders as naïve ‘virtue signallers’, and out of touch with the ordinary fears of the population at large. In this illiberal narrative, human rights are branded as the threat to order. They are side-stepped, dismissed, elasticated and reinterpreted in pursuit of a voracious and unattainable security ideal. In a range of states in the Global South, on the other hand, terrorism is a real threat to every-day life, metastasising in weak states that lack robust rule of law and human rights structures. The existence of terrorism signals the state’s incapacity to uphold fundamental structures of security and order, but also its inability to protect and promote the human rights of ordinary citizens. Here the binary opposition between terrorism and human rights manifest through the states incapacity to protect victims and potential victims of violence. Human rights defenders in this context must face the challenge of severely under-resourced security sectors and the threats to human rights that too little security represents. The binary opposition between ‘security’ and ‘human rights’ is thus a characteristic of both strong and weak states, but they represent oppositional challenges. In strong states, rights are threatened by the state’s coercive overreach, by the pursuit of too much security. In weak states, rights are threatened by the state’s coercive under-reach, by too little security. This lecture will survey and assess the challenges of terrorism to the international human rights order from both of these perspectives. Ultimately it will question whether human rights can respond adequately to both challenges while maintaining internally coherent. In this sense, the lecture will suggest that terrorism makes human rights insecure.




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Prof. Dr. LIORA LAZARUS