Professor Shazia Choudhry kickstarts the first CLT SSLT seminar for 2024

The Centre for Legal Theory (CLT) is pleased to welcome Professor Shazia Choudhry to be our speaker for the Singapore Symposium in Legal Theory (SSLT). Professor Choudhry conducted a seminar on 11 March 2024, followed by a Roundtable discussion on her paper, “When Women’s Rights are Not Human Rights – the Non- Performativity of the Human Rights of Victims of Domestic Abuse within English Family Law” on 12 March 2024.

In her seminar, Professor Choudhry highlights the need to pay attention to the systemic injustice in operation due to a patriarchy social system in India, and a need to focus on the appropriate legislative and policy response to new and emerging forms of violence against women, such as image based sexual abuse. She noted that recourse to formal mechanisms of support, security and justice is still lacking despite the introduction of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA). There was a lack of awareness by survivors as right-bearing individuals, and the seminar discussed the various instruments available (or can be made available) for survivors of domestic abuse.

In the roundtable discussion, Professor Choudhry discussed the findings from a UK research on victims of domestic abuse and their experiences of human rights law in family courts, and the recommendations as well as implications for feminist organisations if the recommendations were to be fully realised.

Shazia Choudhry is a Professor in the Faculty of Law and Hackney Fellow in Law at Wadham College. She was appointed Academic Fellow of the Inner Temple from 2014-2017 and is now an Associate Academic Fellow. She was elected as an Academic Bencher in 2020. Her research is focused on gender, human rights and violence against women and seeks to examine various dimensions of these areas from an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective. In doing so she employs doctrinal, theoretical and empirical methods.  Her scholarship sits at the interface of criminal law, public law (particularly human rights law) and family law.

More about the SSLT seminars at https://law.nus.edu.sg/clt/the-singapore-symposium-in-legal-theory/

This post event highlight is also available in pdf here.