Abstract

The Centre of Governance and Human Rights is delighted to host Clive Baldwin, Senior Legal Advisor at Human Rights Watch, as part of the CGHR Practitioner Series. All are welcome to attend. The talk and Q&A will be followed by drinks with the speaker.

Clive Baldwin works as Senior Legal Advisor for the legal and policy office at Human Rights Watch, where he has been working on issues of international law since 2007. His areas of focus include the Middle East, north and west Africa and discrimination law.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Clive Baldwin was a practicing lawyer in London for the human rights law firm, Bindman and Partners, and also worked on European human rights litigation at the AIRE Centre. He subsequently worked for the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, and later served as Head of Advocacy for Minority Rights Group International. While at Minority Rights Group, he implemented the organisation’s first global litigation program, which brought cases to international legal bodies on behalf of the rights of minorities around the world.

One of the cases he litigated and won included the Endorois Community v Kenya, the first indigenous land rights case at the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights. In Finci v Bosnia-Hercegovina, he successfully challenged the Bosnian constitution’s exclusion of Jews from the presidency and upper house of parliament in the first such ruling of the European Court of Human Rights.

Most recently, Clive Baldwin helped Human Rights Watch initiate a case with two other organisations against Libya at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights based on allegations that numerous human rights violations had occurred. His efforts resulted in the first ruling against a state by the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

Clive Baldwin received a bachelor degree in international history and politics from the University of Leeds, a master in international relations from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and studied law at City University, London.

About the CGHR Practitioner Series: For those hoping to pursue a career in the ‘Third Sector’, especially amidst a broad range of organisations and agencies whose mandates can be loosely collected under the umbrella headings of ‘Human Rights and Social Justice’, ‘Conflict and Security’ or ‘Development and Humanitarian Aid,’ the terrain can be difficult to navigate. A sound academic training, the kind provided by Cambridge University, is important but certainly not enough to prepare students for the transition into working in this sector. Through a mixture of substantive discussion, personal reflection and practical advice, the CGHR Practitioner Series brings together high‐level experts working in these fields and creates a forum in which students and researchers can listen and ask questions about what this work actually involves, seek out reflections from experience on the dilemmas and challenges faced, and probe the skill set and experience needed to forge a career in these fields.