
Associate Professor; Fellow (Clare College); Director of Studies.
Interests
Kirsty welcomes applications from potential PhD students interested in pursuing projects relating to human rights law and theory, especially those involving migrants' rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, privacy, protest or hate speech.
CV / Biography
Kirsty Hughes is an Associate Professor specialising in Human Rights Law. She is joint General Editor of the European Human Rights Law Review and Deputy Director of the Centre for Public Law, University of Cambridge. She is convenor of the Human Rights Law paper and a lecturer in Human Rights and Animal Rights. She supervises human rights undergraduate and graduate human rights dissertations and theses.
Her research interests are in the fields of human rights law, and she employs a range of multidisciplinary, theoretical, comparative and doctrinal approaches. She is particularly interested in the relationship between theory and human rights reasoning, privacy, the human rights of migrants, modern slavery and human trafficking, hate speech and protest.
Her research has been published in leading journals including the Modern Law Review, Law Quarterly Review and the Cambridge Law Journal. Her article on the right privacy in the Modern Law Review was awarded the Wedderburn Prize (in honour of Lord Wedderburn of Charlton) and was cited by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2021. Her article on the draft judgment procedure in the Law Quarterly Review was cited by the Court of Appeal in England and Wales, and her submissions to the Joint Select Committee on Privacy and Injunctions (co-authored with Lord Grabiner QC) were relied upon in the Joint Committee's Report Privacy and Injunctions (March 2012). Her submissions to the Joint Committee on Human Rights on EU nationals' residency post-Brexit were cited in their final report (December 2016) and in October 2017 she was invited to give oral evidence to the House of Lords EU Justice Sub-Committee inquiry 'Brexit: Citizens' Rights'. She has also contributed to national and international media coverage on legal issues, including the BBC, The New York Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She has been the recipient of a number of research fellowships including a CRASSH research fellowship at the University of Cambridge to work on a project concerning the right to protest, a visiting research fellowship at UNSW, a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant which funded her research at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and a Jean Monnet Fellowship at EUI (Firenze). She has also been consulted by the Australian Law Reform Commission on several privacy related projects and has lectured at universities in Gdansk, Torun, Wroclaw Lublin and Warsaw (Poland), Prague (Czech Republic), Bratislava (Slovakia) and Budapest (Hungary).
Kirsty is a member of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference Committee. She has also co-convened the Civil Liberties and Human Rights section of the Society for Legal Scholars and convened the Cambridge Human Rights mooting team, the Cambridge Human Rights Film Series and the Cambridge Law and Race series.
She is a member of Blackstone Chambers Academic Panel and a member of the Editorial Board of Public Law.
Publications
Books
Dimensions of Privacy: Privacy Theory and Article 8 ECHR (Hart Publishing, 2020)
Common Law Constitutional Rights (with Mark Elliott) (Hart, 2019)
