We are excited to welcome this year’s 2026-2027 Visiting Fellows: Girmachew Alemu Aneme, Senuri De Silva, Michael Lysander Fremuth, Kirsty Hughes, and Jeffrey Vogt.
The HRP Visiting Fellows Program gives individuals with a demonstrated commitment to human rights an opportunity to engage with the human rights community at HLS, enrich in HLS events and conferences, and engage in research that advances human rights knowledge. HRP visiting fellows, many of whom are established scholars and leaders in their field, provide opportunities for students and faculty to benefit from their diverse experiences and perspectives and connect with a global cohort of human rights actors.
Girmachew Alemu Aneme is the Eleanor Roosevelt Visiting Fellow with the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. His work focuses on human rights and the rule of law in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. He holds advanced degrees from the University of Oslo and Harvard Kennedy School and has held appointments at Harvard Law School and the University of Minnesota Law School. Dr. Aneme has extensive experience teaching graduate level courses in human rights and global affairs. His scholarship examines political and civil rights, women’s and children’s rights, legal pluralism, transitional justice, and accountability mechanisms.
Senuri De Silva is the Neelan Tiruchelvam Fellow with HRP and The Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. She is a doctoral researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, specializing in domestic and international criminal law. Her research focuses on domestic prosecutions for atrocity crimes in South Asia. During the fellowship, her research will ask what an international criminal law lens reveals about the limits and possibilities of Sri Lanka’s domestic accountability framework for atrocity crimes.
Michael Lysander Fremuth is a generalist in public international and human rights law. He is Full Professor for Fundamental and Human Rights at the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna, Scientific Director of the Master Program in Human Rights, Co-Director of the Research Network on Democracy and Human Rights, as well as Coordinator for the faculty’s cooperation with Ukraine. Furthermore, Fremuth is director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights, one of the largest research institutes of its kind in Europe that combines basic and applied research to generate added value and societal impact.
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. Her co-authored book Human Rights Law in the UK was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. She is also co-editor of Race and European Human Rights Law, which will be published by Hart in 2027 and was co-editor of Common Law Constitutional Rights (Hart, 2020).
Jeffrey Vogt is the Rule of Law Director of the Solidarity Center and co-founder of the International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network. In 2022, he was appointed to the ILO Governing Body and the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association. From 2011 to 2016, he was legal director of the International Trade Union Confederation and, previously, served as the Deputy International Director of the AFL-CIO. A graduate of Cornell Law School (J.D., LL.M.), he is editor and co-author of The Right to Strike in International Law (Hart 2020) and The Right to Strike Reimagined (Hart 2026).
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