Professor Elvira Dominguez-Redondo

Faculty of Business and Social Sciences
Department of Law
School of Law, Social and Behavioural Sciences
Penrhyn Road

Professor of Law

[email protected]

ORCID

About

My work interrogates how international legal frameworks are shaped, constrained, and transformed by political power, institutional design, the role of the individual and civil society as well as global inequalities. I specialise in international human rights law, the United Nations system, compliance mechanisms and minority rights.

I am Professor of International Law at Kingston University since 2023, having previously held full-time academic positions at Middlesex University, the University of Ulster, the Irish Centre for Human Rights, and Universidade Carlos III de Madrid. I have held visiting positions at Columbia University, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law. I am an affiliate of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights.

My research has contributed to reframing debates on politicisation within the international human rights system and on the role of peer-review mechanisms influencing State behaviour. I am author of three monographs and dozens, editor of four collaborative books and published dozens of peer-review paper.

My engagement extends beyond academia. I have worked with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human rights, delivered training to judges, diplomats, and policy makers across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, advised governmental and non-governmental bodies and contributed to litigation through amici curiae. I am a member of the advisory Board of the Universal Rights Group and member of the Universal Periodic Review Academic Network (UPRAN).

Qualifications

PhD, 2004 - Topic: United Nations Special Procedures of the Commission on Human Rights
MA, 1998 - Philosophy and Human Rights Law (2 years degree)
LLB, 1995 - Licenciatura en Derecho (4 years degree)
BA Business, 1996 - Diplomatura en Empresariales (3 years degree)
Fellow, UK Higher Education Authority, 2018

Domains

My teaching is grounded in the view that international law must be understood in relation to the political and institutional contexts within which it operates. I teach undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, specialising in international law, human rights and legal research, and have designed and delivered modules in diverse academic settings and legal traditions.

In am an Affiliate of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a member of the teaching faculty of the Oxford/GWU International Human Rights Summer School (2023, 2026). I also coordinate the intensive module on the Protection of Human rights in the United Nations System (50 hours) for the LLM International Human Rights at Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (since 2022).

The credit-bearing modules I have led include Public International Law, International Human rights, Human rights in the UK, International Organisations and Dispute Resolution, International Commercial Arbitration, Humanitarian Law, Consular and Diplomatic Law, Minority Rights, and European Union Law. Across these modules, I have combined doctrinal teaching with problem-based and practice-oriented approaches. For example, in the 2025-2026 academic year, my International Law syllabus was structured through the lens of the 2025 ICJ Advisory Opinion on Climate Change, using it to frame core topics such as sources, subjects, and international responsibility. I also develop complementary digital teaching resources, including an educational YouTube channel on international law and human rights designed to support learning and make research accessible beyond the classroom.

I have contributed to the development and delivery of specialised LLM programmes in human rights at multiple institutions, including Middlesex University, the University of Ulster, the Irish Centre for Human Rights, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. In collaboration with colleagues at the University of Duhok (Kurdistan), I co-designed the first LLM in Human Rights in Iraq, delivered under conditions of significant institutional and political constraint.

My experience also includes teaching on intensive postgraduate human rights programmes, including the University of Oxford Summer Course on Human Rights (2023, 2026) and leading the two-week (60 hours) module on Protection of Human Rights in the United Nations at the University of Alcalá de Henares since 2022.

My teaching also includes intensive postgraduate and professional training. I have designed and delivered specialist courses on UN politics and human rights, crisis responses in human rights practice, and women's rights, including CPD programmes delivered with Prof. Christine Chinking at Matrix Chambers.

I have supervised hundreds of LLM dissertations and nine PhD candidates to successful completion.

Qualifications

Public International Law, especially United Nations Institutions and Title to Territory
Minority Rights
International Human Rights Mechanisms at United Nations and Regional Level
Affirmative Action Measures
Relationship between Development, Security and Human Rights
Interplay between Politics, Human Rights and International Law

Courses taught

My research interrogates how international legal norms are shaped, interpreted, and contested in practice through the interaction of legal scholarship, political processes, and institutional design. While grounded in international human rights law, my work engages more broadly with questions of authority, compliance, and the hierarchical structures of the international legal order. Across my publications, I challenge assumptions underpinning international law through sustained, fact-based research.

My work can be organised around three interrelated agendas:

Reframing Politicisation and Institutional Alignments in International Law

A central contribution of my work has been to reframe the role of politicisation within international law. Against dominant narratives that treat politicisation as a pathology, I have shown that it can under specific conditions, enhance the effectiveness and legitimacy of international legal mechanisms.

My work highlights the importance of refining conceptual frameworks and distinguishes between different meanings of politicisation, arguing that, understood as direct influence by non-state actors, lobbies, or ideological interests, international law may in fact be less exposed to such pressures than domestic legal systems, with human rights representing a notable exception. This distinction offers a conceptual clarification that has been largely absent from existing scholarship.

This argument is developed most fully in In Defense of Politicisation of Human Rights: UN Special Procedures (Oxford University Press, 2020) which draws on extensive empirical and archival research to demonstrate how political processes are integral to the functioning of international institutions and can trigger meaningful positive impact.

My earlier work on minority protection, including Minority Rights in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2006, with J Castellino) similarly challenged the Eurocentric assumptions underpinning the focus on national minorities, offering one of the first – and still unique – systematic comparative analyses of minority protection frameworks in South and East Asia.

Rethinking Compliance, Peer-Review and Norm Formation

My research has contributed to a better understanding of compliance mechanisms in international law, particularly through pioneering empirical work on the United Nations Universal Period Review (UPR) in 2018, debunking the presumption that intergovernmental, peer-review processes could not yield improvements of human rights situations. These findings, published in the Chinese Journal of International Law, Canadian Yearbook of International Law (with E McMahon) and New Zealand Law Review, led a shift in the scholarship on the UPR, prompting authors such as Cowell, Schabas, Shah, Sivakumaran, and Vengoechea to test one of the main hypotheses I left open, namely that UPR recommendations could trigger the emergence of customary law.

My current research extends this agenda through collaborative projects aimed at developing innovative methodologies to analyse patterns of implementation of UN human rights recommendations at scale, contributing to emerging work on data-driven approaches to international legal research.

"Legal Geography", Inequality and Territoriality

A distinct third strand of my work examines how international law constructs and sustains global hierarchies. My research on North-South categories in international law, interrogates the conceptual and symbolic geography of the discipline, demonstrating how these terms function as structuring devices that shape legal argument, institutional mandates, and claims to authority. This line of enquiry connects with earlier publications addressing broader questions concerning the relationship between human rights, development, and security, and the role of law in mediating global inequalities and resolving internal contradictions.

In parallel, I engage with foundational questions of general international law, including title to territory and the legal status of contested spaces. My work on "forgotten territories" such as Dokdo/Takeshima and Western Sahara, shows how narratives are mobilised to 'invisiblise' politically inconvenient or marginalised spaces, effectively producing enduring forms of legal and political limbo.

Qualifications

International Law
Minority Rights
International Human Rights mechanisms
Affirmative Actions
Relationship between Human Rights, Development and Security
Interplay between politics, human rights and international law

Specialisms

United Nations Institutions
Title to Territory
Minority Rights
International Organisations and Dispute Resolution
International Human Rights Mechanisms

Scholarly affiliations

Society of Legal Scholars
Universal Periodic Review Academic Network (UPRAN)
Advisory Group of the Universal Rights Group
Coordinator of the Module Protection of Human Rights in the UN, Universidad Alcala de Henares
Teaching Faculty Summer Course Human Rights University of Oxford (July 2023, July 2026)
Spanish Association of International Law

Publications

When the host turns hostile: moving UN headquarters to save multilateralism?

Tranchez, Elodie and Domínguez Redondo, Elvira, 2026, Opinio Juris, Published

Professor Elvira Dominguez-Redondo

About

Qualifications

Domains

Teaching and learning

Research

Business, knowledge transfer and international

Professional practice, knowledge exchange and impact

Leadership and management

Publications

Articles

Books

Book Sections/Chapters

Stay connected