Associate Professor Dr Fernand De Varennes

Associate Professor
LL.B., LL.M., Dr.Jur.

Dr de Varennes is a graduate of the Ecole de droit, Universite de Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada (LL.B., 1988) the London School of Economics and Political Science (LL.M., 1992), and the Universiteit Maastricht (Dr.Jur., 1995).

Dr de Varennes was formerly Associate Professor of Law in the Ecole de droit, Universite de Moncton and he has taught in the areas of personal property securities law, practice of law, criminal law, tort law and legal writing. He has published books, articles or other publications in English and French in language rights, indigenous peoples and minority rights, international law and ethnic conflicts.

Dr de Varennes is also a former Director at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Human Rights and the Prevention of Ethnic Conflict and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law. He is recognised as one of the world's leading legal experts on language rights and has written two seminal works on this topic: Language, Minorities and Human Rights (1996) and A Guide to the Rights of Minorities and Language (2001). He has extensive international recognition for his research work on international law, human rights, minorities and ethnic conflicts and has worked with numerous international organisations such as the United Nations’ Working Group on the Rights of Minorities, UNESCO and the OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities on these issues.

He is Senior (Non-Resident) Research Associate at the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany, on the advisory board of numerous research centres and journals around the world and has taught in numerous institutions around the world, including at Seikei University in Tokyo; the South Asian Human Rights and Peace Studies Orientation Course in Kathmandu, Nepal; Sam Ratulangi University in Manado, Indonesia; the European Academy in Bolzano, Italy, the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, the University of Pécs in Hungary, the Cornell University - Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne Summer School in Paris, France, the European Politics Programme at the University of Pécs, Hungary, Turku Law School and Åbo Akademi Institute for Human Rights in Finland. He has held the prestigious Tip O’Neill Peace Fellowship at INCORE (Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity) in Derry, Northern Ireland. Dr de Varennes is also a 2004 Nominee for the Linguapax Award (Barcelona, Spain). The prizes are awarded to linguists, researchers, professors and members of the civil society in acknowledgement of their outstanding work in the field of linguistic diversity and/or multilingual education. He has published five books and over fifty scientific articles and reports. His most recent publications include a two-volume series on human rights documents on Asia and a UNESCO report on the rights of migrants. He is currently working a three-volume book series on ethnic and internal conflicts worldwide and a strategy paper for UNESCO on the rights of migrants. His research has appeared in seventeen languages (Albanian, English, Farsi, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Japanese, Latvian, Macedonian, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish).