Fourth Annual Lecture of the Human Rights Centre: E. Tendayi Achiume

Racial Borders: the urgency of a racial justice critique of international borders and migration.

This year’s lecture was delivered by E. Tendayi Achiume and chaired by Andrew Fagan, Director of the Human Rights Centre at Essex. Recorded on Thursday 30 July 2020, the Fourth Annual Lecture of the Human Rights Centre took place via Zoom.

E. Tendayi Achiume is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and a research associate of the African Center for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

She is also the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, and is the first woman to serve in this role since its creation in 1994. The current focus of her scholarship is the global governance of racism and xenophobia; and the legal and ethical implications of colonialism for contemporary international migration. In 2016, she co-chaired the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law. She is also a recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award—the highest university-wide honour for excellence in teaching. Her publications include Migration as Decolonization, Stanford Law Review; Governing Xenophobia, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law; Syria, Cost-Sharing and the Responsibility to Protect Refugees, Minnesota Law Review; and Beyond Prejudice: Structural Xenophobic Discrimination Against Refugees, Georgetown Journal of International Law.