International Human Rights Law MSt

University of Oxford

About the course

This is a part-time degree offered over two academic years. It is designed in particular for lawyers and other human rights advocates who wish to pursue advanced studies in international human rights law, but may need to do so alongside work responsibilities.

The course is offered jointly by the Department for Continuing Education and the Faculty of Law. It includes two periods of online distance learning as well as two summer residentials held at New College, Oxford.

A central objective of the course is to ensure that you not only know about but can also effectively and expertly apply human rights law. The curriculum places equal emphasis on the substance of human rights law, its implementation and research.

Students come from all over the world and from a variety of advocacy settings. in private and corporate practice, with various international and non-governmental organisations, governments, universities, foundations, the media, the armed forces, medicine and other fields. The faculty is also diverse and includes internationally recognised human rights scholars and advocates. The programme seeks the widest possible cultural, belief, identity and socio-economic diversity among both students and tutors.

Assessment

The degree is assessed by coursework (20%), examinations (50%) and a dissertation (30%).

Your first period of distance learning is assessed by way of assignments, and the second by way of a dissertation. You will sit two examinations during each of the two summer residentials.

Graduate destinations

Students have gone on to work as prosecutors and defence lawyers at the International Criminal Court, other UN criminal tribunals, and various regional human rights bodies. They work in private and multi-national corporate practice; in various ministries in their national governments and as UN officials ranging from refugee legal protection officers to country representatives. Others are judges, university professors, lawyers with their national armed forces, heads of NGOs and journalists.

Graduates from the course also include economists, obstetricians, epidemiologists, psychiatrists and forensic anthropologists. They are senior advisors in government around the world, Foreign Ministries, Defence Ministries and each and every one of the regional human rights bodies. They are defence counsel at Guantanamo Bay, do front-line community work in Afghanistan and emergency co-ordination in Sudan, Haiti and many other places. They represent indigenous peoples in northern Canada, Western Australia, the Philippines and Brazil.