Law School Lecture on Human Rights

An internationally known expert on human rights will give the University of Maine School of Law’s Godfrey Lecture. Kevin Boyle, director of the Human Rights Center at the University of Essex, U.K., will speak on “Hate Speech: The United States vs. the Rest of the World” at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, November 15 in the Moot Court Room at the Law School.

The Godfrey Lecture is free and open to the public.

Boyle, the Distinguished Godfrey Visiting Professor in the School of Law for the fall semester, defends victims of human rights abuses from all over the world. His clients have included IRA hunger strikers like Bobby Seal in Northern Ireland; the families of victims of the NATO bombing of Kosovo; and Turkish Kurds against the Turkish government. He’s undertaken human rights missions for Amnesty International in Somalia, South Africa, and Gambia.

In his lecture, Boyle will compare the national approaches of the U.S. and other countries in controlling speech that incites racial, ethnic, religious or other hatreds. He also will discuss the compatibility of the U.S. approach with the standards of international human rights law.

Boyle’s primary concentration in human rights has been issues of religious freedom, especially the religious conflict in Northern Ireland. Boyle served in 1995 as a consultant to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland and in 1994 as a consultant for the European Commission in Brussels for Human Rights in South Africa. In his 30 years as a barrister, Boyle has argued many leading cases before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

The Human Rights Center has cooperated with many international organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International in pursuit of its research. Boyle is responsible currently for overseeing a democratic audit of human rights procedure in the U.K. In addition, Boyle coordinated the compilation of a handbook for international human rights in 1995.

Before joining the University of Essex, Boyle served as the founding Director of the London-based NGO, Article 19, the International Centre against Censorship. Previously, he was dean of the law school at University College Galway, Ireland. He has taught law at The Queen’s University, Belfast and been a visiting fellow at Yale University and a visiting professor at La Trobe University, Australia. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and reports on human rights and international law, censorship and Northern Ireland. Boyle holds a diploma in criminology from Cambridge University in addition to his L.L.B. from Belfast.