Professor Francesca Klug

Professor Francesca Klug OBE is a Visiting Professor at LSE Human Rights.

From 2001-15 Francesca was a Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights (CsHR) where she was also Director of the Human Rights Futures Project ( now housed at the British Institute of Human Rights). She was formerly a member of the Advisory Boards of both the CsHR and of the LSE's Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) and is now a member of the Advisory Committee of the Department of Law and Criminology at Sheffield Hallam University.

Prior to transferring to LSE Francesca was a Senior Research Fellow at King's College Law School where she assisted the government in devising the model for incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, reflected in the Human Rights Act (HRA). She was a member of the Government's Task Force responsible for overseeing implementation of the HRA.

Francesca is an Academic Expert at Doughty Street Chambers and a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Political Quarterly. She is an Advisory Board member of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and of the human rights NGO, Renee Cassin. She was previously a Commissioner on the independent Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life, reporting at the end of 2015, and was formerly Chair of the charities Freedom from Torture and the British Institute of Human Rights.

From 2006-09 Francesca was a Commissioner on the statutory Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) where she was the Lead Commissioner on the EHRC’s Human Rights Inquiry published in 2009. She was formerly a member of the EHRC Steering Group and Task Force which advised on the establishment of the Commission and worked as an independent academic advisor to ministers and officials on the Equality Act 2006. She was also a Specialist Adviser to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, carrying out a published review of their working practices in 2006. Between 2007-9 Francesca was a member of the Bill of Rights and Responsibilities Reference Group at the Ministry of Justice.

Francesca was awarded an OBE for services to human rights in 2002 and was the joint winner of the Times/Justice award for an outstanding contribution to civil justice in 1998. She won the Bernard Crick prize for the best article published by Political Quarterly in 2009, which was presented at the annual George Orwell Prize event in May 2010.

Throughout her career Francesca has written and lectured widely on human rights. Values for a Godless Age: the story of the UK’s New Bill of Rights was published by Penguin in 2000. She co-edited a special issue of the European Human Rights Law Review with Jane Gordon, published in December 2010, to mark the 10th anniversary of the Human Rights Act. Francesca's column for The Guardian's Comment is Free, 'Blogging the Bill of Rights', was published as a booklet by Liberty in June 2010. Her most recent book, A Magna Carta for all Humanity, homing in on human rights was published by Routledge in 2015 to coincide with the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. She has written regularly for legal and political journals and the national press and was a frequent broadcaster.

Awards

OBE