Promoting and protecting the welfare of individuals and minority groups is one of the most important aims of public international law.

There are a number of multi-national treaties that set the standard required of states in their treatment of human beings. We find treaties of general application such as the United Nations Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenants, and the African Charter on Human & Peoples’ Rights. We also find specific treaties directed at eliminating certain types of human rights violations such as torture or racial discrimination, or others directed at protecting particular groups of vulnerable people such as refugees, prisoners, women and children.

Our expertise extends to the following broad areas relevant to international human rights standards prescribed by treaties:

  • Advising states on what their international obligations are and on how they should incorporate those international standards into their own domestic legal orders. This includes reviewing states’ domestic laws and policies, measuring them against the international standard prescribed by treaties, and recommending revisions to policy and amendments to legislation.

  • Advising individual people and groups of people whose human rights have been violated by their own states in contravention of the international standards that they are committed to upholding. This includes minority groups who have been discriminated against on the basis of their race or religion or gender; or journalists who have been imprisoned for criticizing their government; or prisoners who have been detained without a fair trial or were tortured by state authorities.

  • We also advise people whose international human rights have been violated whilst travelling abroad. This includes foreigners who are wrongly arrested, or foreigners who have been denied entry into a foreign state or expelled from one, or foreigners whose assets or investments have been wrongly frozen, confiscated or nationalized.