Bonavero Institute of Human Rights
In 2015, for its 25th anniversary, the A B Charitable Trust made a gift to establish the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University, dedicated to the study of human rights law.
The Institute, which is part of the Law Faculty, is a focal point for human rights law scholarship in Oxford, fostering greater academic and public understanding of human rights law through teaching, research and working with other disciplines.
The Bonavero Institute aims to establish a vibrant community of graduate students, host outstanding scholars of law and other disciplines, and collaborate with practitioners engaged in the most pressing contemporary human rights issues around the world.
The A B Charitable Trust provided the Institute with an endowment to fund its Director and core staff in perpetuity. The Institute is located in a new building in the grounds of Mansfield College.
This joint initiative between the Faculty of Law and the College was led by Mansfield’s Principal, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, a barrister well known for championing civil liberties and human rights. Justice Catherine (Kate) O’Regan is the Inaugural Director of the Institute.
Find out more about the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights.
“In 1990, my wife Anne and I founded the A B Charitable Trust whose mission is to defend and promote the cause of human dignity, prioritizing unpopular causes. Clearly, the advancement of human rights had to be part and parcel of this project – though we could hardly have anticipated that human rights per se would become an unpopular cause in some quarters of Western democracies.
We are therefore delighted to support the timely creation of a world-class Institute of Human Rights and cannot think of a better home for it than the internationally-renowned Law Faculty at the University of Oxford. Under its aegis, the new Institute will produce and deploy in the field academic research of such calibre that the lives of men, women and children worldwide will be improved.”
Yves Bonavero
