Human Rights in Practice - Eszter Kirs
The Human Rights in Practice series is an ongoing program aimed to allow students to engage with international law and human rights practitioners in an informal setting to explore diverse career paths in the field.
Eszter Kirs joins the Human Rights Center as a Fulbright visiting scholar in September 2019 for four months. She is an associate professor at the Institute of International Studies of the Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary since 2016. From 2003, she has been lecturing on international law and human rights at various academic institutions. She holds a Ph.D. in international law. Apart from her academic career, she has been a legal officer of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a leading human rights NGO since 2013 where she has contributed to monitoring visits in places of detention, international and domestic advocacy, and a number of transnational projects focusing on the efficient prosecution of hate crimes, human rights trainings of legal practitioners and the operation of National Human Rights Institutions.
In the first part of her academic career, she had a special focus on international criminal law, and she was a member of a defense team at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 2010 to 2015. She has contributed as an expert from 2014 on to the development of online training programs run by the HELP Program of the Council of Europe, two theoretical courses on hate crimes and transitional justice and an innovative skill development course on the prosecution of hate crimes. She was a Fulbright visiting student researcher at the Columbia Law School in 2009-2010. She is the author of a number of academic papers in the fields of both transitional justice and human rights and published two monographs on Transitional Justice in 2012 and on the operation of the ICTY in 2018. Currently, she is a member of the research group of the Hungarian Academy of Science “SPECTRA” on Social prerequisites for the effective fight against bias-motivated crimes through criminal law and minority rights protection.