Professor Shazia Choudhry delivers Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Lecture

On 20 August 2024, Professor Shazia Choudhry delivered a lecture titled “Human Rights, the Family Justice System and Domestic Abuse” at the Wee Chong Jin Moot Court located in NUS Law’s Bukit Timah Campus.

The response of family justice systems towards victims of domestic abuse across the world epitomises a lack of understanding of the dynamics of domestic abuse and the utilisation of family law proceedings by perpetrators to continue abuse, most particularly with reference to so called “parental alienation”.  Most stark, however, is the lack of reference to human rights law. The private arena of family law has remained largely untroubled by advances in the understanding of domestic abuse and the applicability of due diligence standards and positive obligations in this regard. This lecture provided a detailed overview of these issues and an analysis of the relevance of international human rights law to this area.

Domestic abuse is one of the most serious and pervasive forms of violence against women and girls and constitutes a violation of their human rights. Given the prevalence of domestic abuse in relationships, and that separation from a perpetrator can be the most dangerous period for the victim, a focus of increasing concern has been the dangers posed by post-separation contact to both adult and child victims (either as direct victims or as witnesses), including sexual abuse). The phenomena of domestic abuse perpetrators using family law proceedings as a tool to continue the abuse and coercion has been demonstrated by a substantial body of research.  This not only facilitates the secondary traumatisation of victims of abuse but also implicates state institutions in its perpetuation, most particularly when access to children is mandated and custody of children is awarded to perpetrators, despite evidence of a history of domestic and/or sexual abuse. In recent years, it is apparent that the concept of “parental alienation” in its many forms and iterations, has played a significant role in providing justifications for such outcomes which is causing widespread alarm and distress.

The Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Programme was launched in 2012 as one of several initiatives to pay tribute to the late Madam Kwa Geok Choo, wife of Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Since its launch, the Programme has enabled NUS Law to regularly bring in leading law academics to teach an intensive course and to share their perspectives on highly topical issues with our students, faculty and the wider legal fraternity. We are honoured that this Programme serves to uphold Madam Kwa’s remarkable legacy, by continuing her commitment to Singapore being an outward-looking country with a thriving legal discourse. Past Distinguished Visitors include Gary Born, Christine Chinkin, Matthew Harding, Ran Hirschl, Michael Klausner, Peter Mirfield, Francis Reynolds, Cheryl Saunders, Mark Tushnet, Donal Nolan, Jane Ginsburg and Martin Petrin. The lectures given will also be published in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies.

About Professor Shazia Choudhry

Professor Shazia Choudhry is Professor of Law and the Jeffrey Hackney Tutorial Fellow in Law at Wadham College, University of Oxford. She is also an Academic Bencher and Associate Academic Fellow at the Inner Temple.

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, human rights law and family law.

Professor Choudhry was recently nominated as the United Kingdom’s first candidate for election to the UN CEDAW Committee.