Prof. Anne Bayefsky

Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow with Hudson Institute. Before joining Hudson, she was an adjunct professor and associate research scholar from 2002 to 2004, and a visiting professor from 2001 to 2002, at Columbia University Law School in New York. In 1996, Bayefsky joined the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto as a Full Professor. She is currently on leave. From 1996 to 1999, she was the director of York’s Centre for Refugee Studies. From 1998 to 2002, she served as project director for the university’s Human Rights Treaty Study, an international review of the U.N. human rights treaty system which resulted in the publication of a major report in collaboration with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. From 1981 to 1996, Bayefsky was a professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Ottawa.
In January 2003, she launched www.bayefsky.com, a human rights website dedicated to enhancing the implementation of the human rights legal standards of the United Nations. A highly-regarded international human rights legal database, the site has attracted over 750,000 visitors from 181 countries.

Bayefsky has been the recipient of many honors. Each July from 2002 to 2004, Bayefsky has been a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was the 1992 recipient of the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights Research, Canada’s annual premier human rights research fellowship, and a 1995-1996 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant in Peace and International Cooperation.

She is a member of the International Law Association Committee on Human Rights Law and Practice and on the Governing Board of U.N. Watch, an ECOSOC-accredited NGO based in Geneva. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the series “Refugees and Human Rights,” published by Brill.
In 2001, she was a delegate of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists to the NGO Forum and a delegate of UN Watch to the Durban World Conference Against Racism. She has served as an academic member of the Canadian Delegations to several international meetings, including the U.N. Human Rights Commission (1993-1996), the U.N. General Assembly (1984 and 1989), and the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights (1993). In 1995, she was a delegate of the American Society of International Law to the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women.
She holds a B.A., M.A. and LL.B. from the University of Toronto and a M.Litt. from Oxford University. She is a barrister and solicitor of the Ontario Bar.

Bayefsky is a frequent contributor to the editorial pages of newspapers and periodicals including: The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Jerusalem Post, National Review, National Post (Canada), the Chicago Sun-Times, and The New York Sun. She has a regular column in the National Review Online. She has appeared on CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, as well as serving as a frequent radio commentator on WABC. She is the author or editor of several books, including: How to Complain to the UN Human Rights Treaty System, (Kluwer Law International and Transnational Publishers, 2002); editor of The UN Human Rights Treaty System: Universality at the Crossroads (Kluwer Law International and Transnational Publishers, 2001); co-editor of The UN Human Rights Treaty System in the Twenty-First Century (Kluwer Law Int., 2000); editor of Human Rights and Forced Displacement (Martinus Nijhoff, 2000); and author of Self-Determination in International Law: Quebec and Lessons Learned (Kluwer Law Int., 2000).