Geoff Gilbert

Geoff Gilbert is a Professor of Law in the School of Law and Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. He was Head of Department between 2000-2003 and 2011-13. In 2012, he was appointed a Professorial Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Refugee Law since 2002. He is author of ‘Current Issues in the Application of the Exclusion Clauses’ in Feller, Türk and Nicholson, Refugee Protection in International Law (2003), part of UNHCR’s Global Consultations on the 50th Anniversary of the 1951 Convention. He was founding Director of Studies for UNHCR’s annual Thematic Refugees and Human Rights course for judges, government officials and UNHCR staff at the International Institute for Humanitarian Law, Sanremo, Italy, from 2005 to 2007. In 2014 he was appointed a consultant to UNHCR (with Anna Magdalena Rüsch) on Rule of Law: Engagement for Solutions and is part of the Solutions Alliance Thematic Group on Rule of Law.

He was Specialist Adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights in its inquiry into the treatment of asylum-seekers, 2006-07. He was part of the Human Rights Centre's research programme on human rights in situations of acute crisis that was carried out on behalf of DfID and then directed Essex's residential training programme of human rights for DfID staff, 2006-07. He drafted a report in 2010 for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on a possible Protocol to the ECHR dealing with minority rights. He has carried out human rights training on behalf of the Council of Europe and UNHCR in the Russian Federation (Siberia, the Urals and Kalmykskaya), Georgia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Kosovo. He has advised governments on their laws in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the FSU, and was the Director of the OSCE training programme on combating torture for judges in Serbia and Montenegro. His areas of interest are international criminal law, the protection of refugees and other displaced persons in international law, the protection of minorities in international law, international humanitarian law and international human rights law. In 2009 he was elected a Bencher of the Middle Temple and was called in February 2010.