Fernand de Varennes

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT FERNAND DE VARENNES

Dr Fernand de Varennes is Extraordinary Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Pretoria (South Africa), Adjunct Professor at the National University of Ireland-Galway (Ireland), and Cheng Yu Tung Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong (China). He also holds the mandate of United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues. He is renown as one of the world’s leading experts on the international human rights of minorities, focusing particularly on issues surrounding languages. He also has played a prominent role in promoting young Asian scholars in human rights as Editor-in-Chief of the Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law and has worked and written in areas of international law such as the prevention of ethnic conflicts, the rights of migrants, the relationship between ethnicity, human rights and democracies. He completed his law degrees in Canada (LLB, Moncton), the United Kingdom (LLM, London School of Economics and Political Science), and the Netherlands (Dr Juris, Maastricht). He has taught human rights or international law in universities in Australia, Finland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, the Maldives, and South Africa. He has taught a number of human rights courses in the LLM programme in human rights at Peking University in China, and federalism and autonomy at the Ethiopian Civil Service University in Addis Ababa. Dr de Varennes’ research and publications record spans over 200 publications in more than 30 languages. In recognition of his work and achievements in the field of human rights and the protection of minorities, he has received accolades from Africa, Asia, and Europe, including the 2004 Linguapax Award (Barcelona, Spain), the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, the Tip O’Neill Peace Fellowship (Northern Ireland, UK), and was nominated for the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights (Gwangju, South Korea).