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About
Stephen Humphreys is a Professor of International Law. He is a Commissioner on the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law. He was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C and Academic Advisor to the International Bar Association’s Task Force on Climate Justice and Human Rights. He was formerly Research Director at the International Council on Human Rights Policy in Geneva, and, before that, Senior Officer at the Open Society Institute’s Justice Initiative in New York and Budapest. He has conducted policy work on climate change and in human rights in a variety of fora. His research interests include international legal and critical theory; rule of law; law and development; climate change; the laws of war; and transnational legal processes. He holds a PhD from Cambridge and a Master’s degree in law from SOAS. His publications include Theatre of the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the edited volume, Human Rights and Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Research
Research Interests
Current research focuses on the distribution of risk and security under international and transnational law. The work looks at various different areas of law — international security arrangements, international criminal law, environmental law, investment and trade law, transnational developmental and financial arrangements — in order to gauge their overall impact in combination on the experience of risk. I retain a special interest in climate change and human rights, in legal theory, drawing in particular on critical theory, and in rule of law promotion, the contemporary form of law and development.
Publications
Theatre of the Rule of Law: Transnational Legal Intervention in Theory and Practice (Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law No.73; 2010; paperback edition published 2012)
Theatre of the Rule of Law presents the first sustained critique of rule of law promotion – the push to shape laws and institutions that pervades international development and post-conflict reconstruction policy today. While successful in disseminating a policy everywhere privileging the private over the public, this expansive global enterprise has largely failed in its stated goals of alleviating poverty and fortifying ‘fragile states’. Moreover, in its execution, the field deviates sharply from ‘rule of law’ principles as commonly conceived. To explain this, Stephen Humphreys examines the history of the rule of law as a term of art and a spectrum of today’s interventions, as well as earlier examples of legal export to other ends. Rule of law promotion, he suggests, is best understood as a kind of theatre, the staging of a morality tale about the good life, intended for edification and emulation but blind to its own internal contradictions.
click here for publisher's site
Human Rights and Climate Change, edited by Stephen Humphreys Cambridge University Press, 2009 (Foreword by Mary Robinson)
As the effects of climate change continue to be felt, appreciation of its future transformational impact on numerous areas of public law and policy is set to grow. Among these, human rights concerns are particularly acute. They include forced mass migration, increased disease incidence and strain on healthcare systems, threatened food and water security, the disappearance and degradation of shelter, land, livelihoods and cultures, and the threat of conflict. This inquiry into the human rights dimensions of climate change looks beyond potential impacts to examine the questions raised by climate change policies: accountability for extraterritorial harms; constructing reliable enforcement mechanisms; assessing redistributional outcomes; and allocating burdens, benefits, rights and duties among perpetrators and victims, both public and private. The book examines a range of so-far unexplored theoretical and practical concerns that international law and other scholars and policy-framers will find increasingly difficult to ignore.
- 'Actuality of Pure Surface' (2024) 11(3) London Review of International Law 535-546
- 'Taking Future Generations Seriously: A Rejoinder to Critics' (2023) 34 (3) European Journal of International Law 683–696
- 'Equity before “Equity”' (2023) 86 (1) Modern Law Review 85-121
- 'Against future generations' 33 (4) European Journal of International Law (2023) 535-546
- 'Climate change pathways and the future of human rights' in N. Bhuta (ed.), The Futures of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2024)
- 'An "international rule of law movement"?' in M Loughlin and J Meierhenrich (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
- 'Climate change, development, and human rights' in Stephen Marks and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Critical Issues of Human Rights and Development (Edward Elgar, 2021)
- 'Ungoverning the Climate' (2020) 11(3) Transnational Legal Theory 244
- 'Delayed and denied: climate inequity and human rights', in D Ismangil, K van der Schaaf & L van Troost, Climate Change, Justice and Human Rights (Amnesty International, 2020)
- 'Data: The Given' in D Joyce and J Hohmann (eds), International Law’s Objects (Oxford University Press, 2019)
- M.R. Allen, O.P. Dube, W. Solecki, F. Aragón-Durand, W. Cramer, S. Humphreys, M. Kainuma, J. Kala, N. Mahowald, Y. Mulugetta, R. Perez, M. Wairiu, and K. Zickfeld (2018) 'Framing and Context' in Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (eds), Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty (World Meteorological Organization, 2018)
- 'The human rights covenants in the light of anthropogenic climate change,’ in D Moeckli, and H Keller (eds) The Human Rights Covenants at 50: Their Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2018)
- 'Climate, technology, justice,’ in A Proelss (ed.) Protecting the Environment for Future Generations: Principles and Actors in International Environmental Law (Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2017)
- 'In the shadow of Paris: theories of justice and principles of harm' (2016) 7(1) Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 1 (editorial)
- 'Climate change: too complex for a special regime?' (2016) 34(1) Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law 51
- 'Theorizing International Environmental Law' (with Y Otomo) in Anne Orford and Florian Hoffmann (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2016)
- 'Anthropocentric Rights', Global Policy (November 12, 2015)
- 'Conscience in the Datasphere' (2015) 6(3) Humanity 361-386
- 'The Rule of Law as Morality Play' (2015) 23 Finnish Yearbook of International Law 3-44
- 'Climate Justice: The Claim of the Past' (2014) 5 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, pp.134-148
- 'Climate Justice: The Claim of the Past' in Anna Grear and Conor Gearty (eds) Choosing a Future: The Social and Legal Aspects of Climate Change (Edward Elgar, 2014)
- 'Laboratories of Statehood: Legal Intervention in Colonial Africa and Today' (2012) 75(4) Modern Law Review 475
- 'Structural Ambiguity: Technology Transfer in Three Regimes' in Margaret A. Young (ed.), Regime Interaction in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
- 'The Fantasy of Success: Climate Change as Discourse', EUI Working Papers Series, RSCAS 2012/67 (2012)
- 'Climate Change and International Human Rights Law' in Rosemary Rayfuse and Shirley Scott (eds), International Law in the Era of Climate Change (Edward Elgar, 2012)
- ‘El teatro del rule of law' (2012) 43 Ius et Veritas 358
- 'Das Theater des Rechtsstaates' (2012) 125(32) Peripherie 8
- 'Competing Claims: Human Rights and Climate Harms', in Stephen Humphreys (ed.), Human Rights and Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2009) (see Books above)
- 'Conceiving Justice: Articulating Common Causes in Distinct Regimes', in Stephen Humphreys (ed.), Human Rights and Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2009) (see Books above)
- 'Polymorphous Sovereignty' in Charles Barbour and George Pavlich (eds.) After Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings (Routledge, 2009)
- 'The Emptiness of Empire and Other Hazards of Theory', (2008) 57 International and Comparative Law Quarterly 225
- 'Are Social Rights Compatible with the Rule of Law? A Realist Inquiry'Hauser Global Law Working Paper 10/06 (2007)
- 'Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception' (2006) 17 European Journal of International Law 677
- 'Nomarchy: On the Rule of Law and Authority in Giorgio Agamben and Aristotle' (2006) 19 Cambridge Review of International Affairs 331
- '1.5 at the ICJ' EJIL: Talk! (25 August 2024)
- 'A Swiss human rights budget?' EJIL: Talk! (12 April 2024)
- ‘How to Define Unjust Planetary Change’, Nature News and Views (31 May 2023) [pdf here, no paywall]
- International Bar Association, Legal Aspects of Climate Change Adaptation (IBA, 2022) [Lead Author]
- M.R. Allen, O.P. Dube, W. Solecki, F. Aragón-Durand, W. Cramer, S. Humphreys, M. Kainuma, J. Kala, N. Mahowald, Y. Mulugetta, R. Perez, M. Wairiu, and K. Zickfeld (2018) 'Framing and Context' in Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (eds), Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty (World Meteorological Organization, 2018) [Lead Author]
- 'Conscience in the Datasphere', Open Democracy (March 14, 2016) [blog post]
- 'Climate change poses an existential threat to human rights', Open Global Rights (July 16, 2015)
- International Bar Association, Achieving Climate Justice and Human Rights in an Era of Climate Disruption (IBA, 2014). [Task Force Member and Academic Advisor]
- International Council on Human Rights Policy, Beyond Technology Transfer: Protecting Human Rights in a Climate-Constrained World (ICHRP, 2011)
- International Council on Human Rights Policy, Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology, Human Rights (ICHRP, 2011)
- International Council on Human Rights Policy, Climate Change and Human Rights: A Rough Guide (ICHRP, 2008)
- Open Society Justice Initiative, Legal Remedies for the Resource Curse (OSI, 2005)
- Open Society Institute, Monitoring EU Accession: Minority Rights (OSI, 2001)
- Open Society Institute, Racism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond (OSI, 2000)
Teaching
Engagement and impact
External Activities
- Commissioner on the IUCN’s World Commission on Environmental Law
- General Editor (Editor-in-Chief) as well as a founder of the London Review of International Law
- Lead Editor of the Cambridge LSE International Studies Book Series
- Lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- Member of the International Bar Association’s Task Force on Climate Justice and Human Rights
- Regularly consulted by international organisations (these have included the Asian Development Bank, the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, the World Bank), and by NGOs, notably on the relationship between climate change and human rights
- Editor, the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment