Course Websites:

Human Rights in Africa
International Law of South-North Relations
Oputa Lectures on Governance in Africa

Professor Obiora Chinedu Okafor joined Osgoode Hall Law School after holding faculty positions at the University of Nigeria and Carleton University. He has served as an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program and was recently named a Canada-US Fulbright Scholar at MIT. His doctoral dissertation at the University of British Columbia received the Governor General's Gold Medal (the university prize for overall best dissertation). He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded study relating to human rights activism in Nigeria, as well as on a project examining the comparative character of refugee rights in the Canada and the USA post 9/11. He has served as an expert panelist for the United Nations Working Group on People of African Descent, and as a human rights consultant for the British Department for International Development. Professor Okafor has published extensively in the fields of international human rights law and refugee law, as well as general public international law. Professor Okafor is the author of The African Human Rights System, Activist Forces, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Legitimizing Human Rights NGOs: Lessons from Nigeria (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2006); and Re-Defining Legitimate Statehood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2000). He has co-edited three books: Legitimate Governance in Africa: International and Domestic Legal Perspectives (The Hague: Kluwer, 1999); Humanizing Our Global Order: Essays in Honour of Ivan Head (University of Toronto Press, 2003); and The Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2003). He has edited or is editing three special journal issues, and sits on the editorial advisory board of a number of scholarly periodicals. Professor Okafor has also published over 45 journal articles, book chapters and other scholarly writings. He received the 2010 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association of Law Teachers and also Osgoode’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2002 and 2007.

Areas of interest: International Law, Immigration/Refugee Law