Hilary Charlesworth was educated at the University of Melbourne and Harvard Law School. She was Professor and Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice at the School of Regulation and Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University and is now Honorary Professor at RegNet. She held an ARC Federation Fellowship from 2005-2010 and an ARC Laureate Fellowship from 2010-2015.

Hilary currently holds an appointment as Harrison Moore Professor and Melbourne Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne Law School. She has held visiting appointments at United States and European universities.

She was President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (1997-2001). She is on the editorial boards of a number of international law journals and served as Co-Editor of the Australian Yearbook of International Law from 1996-2006 and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law 1999-2009. She was joint winner of the American Society of International Law’s 2006 Goler T Butcher Medal in recognition of ‘outstanding contributions to the development or effective realization of international human rights law’. She was elected to the Institut de Droit International in 2011. In 2016 Hilary was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium.

Hilary has worked with various non-governmental human rights organisations on ways to implement international human rights standards and was chair of the Australian Capital Territory government’s inquiry into an ACT bill of rights, which led to the adoption of the ACT Human Rights Act 2004.

She has served as a Judge of the International Court of Justice since late 2021.

Research interests:

Theory and practice of international law; law and society; feminist legal theory; human rights law at international, national and local levels; peacebuilding; and justice and democracy after conflict