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 at Columbia University Law School in New York. She was a visiting professor at the law school from 2001 to 2002.

In January 2003 she launched www.bayefsky.com, a major human rights website dedicated to enhancing the implementation of the human rights legal standards of the United Nations. The site has attracted over 500,000 visitors from 96 countries.

In 1996 Bayefsky began her tenure as a full professor in the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto. She is currently on leave. From 1996 to 1999 she was the director of York’s Centre for Refugee Studies. From 1998 to 2004 she served as project director for the university’s Human Rights Treaty Study, a major international review of the U.N. human rights treaty system. In 2001 she published a 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.

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 she was 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.  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 an 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 recently appeared on CNN after her presentation at the first U.N. conference on anti-Semitism. Bayefsky also was editor-in-chief of the “Refugees and Human Rights” Series (Martinus Nijhoff) and 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).