Governments in the United States and Europe have recently sought new ways to deter, deflect, and deport migrants, and to redefine their rights under human rights law and refugee law for that purpose. The panelists will discuss and compare some of the efforts of the UK and US governments in that direction, including pushbacks and removals to unrelated third countries and the differing responses of the UK Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court. The conversation will also explore political initiatives within the Council of Europe to redefine migrants’ rights under human rights law.
Speakers
Kirsty Hughes is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Cambridge and Director of its Centre for Public Law. Her research interests are in the fields of UK and European human rights law, and she is particularly interested in migration, modern slavery and human trafficking, privacy and protest. She is co-author of Human Rights Law in the UK (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and co-editor of Race and European Human Rights Law (Forthcoming 2027).
Sarah Sherman-Stokes is a clinical associate professor at Boston University School of Law. Ms. Sherman-Stokes teaches Immigration Law and is the associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking Clinic. Her scholarship takes a critical look at immigration law and policy, including at the intersections of asylum law, detention and deportation, and immigrant surveillance, enforcement and abolition.
Professor Gerald L. Neuman is the Director of the Human Rights Program, and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School. He teaches courses in international human rights law, immigration and nationality law, and U.S. constitutional law. From 2011 to 2014, he served as a Member of the UN Human Rights Committee.
This event is co-sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program and the Program on Law & Society in the Muslim World at HLS.