Professor Dianne Otto

Overview

Dianne Otto held the Francine V McNiff Chair in Human Rights Law at Melbourne Law School from 2013-2016. She was Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) from 2011-2015. Recent publications include the ground-breaking collection, which she edited, Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge 2018), an article on peace from a queer feminist perspective in Feminist Review (2020) and, with Emily Jones, a bibliographic chapter ‘Queering International Law’ in Tony Carty (ed), Oxford Bibliographies Online: International Law (2023).

Professor Otto’s scholarly research in the field of public international law and human rights law enjoys a national and international reputation, marked by its emphasis on melding theory with transformative practice. Her research interests include addressing gender, sexuality and race inequalities in the context of international human rights law, the UN Security Council’s peacekeeping work, the technologies of global ‘crisis governance’, threats to economic, social and cultural rights, and the transformative potential of people’s tribunals and other NGO initiatives. Dianne’s scholarship explores how international legal discourse reinforces hierarchies of nation, race, gender and sexuality, and aims to understand how the reproduction of such legal knowledge can be resisted. Her work draws upon a range of critical legal theories particularly those influenced by feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory.

She has held visiting positions at Columbia University, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, London School of Economics, New York University, the University of Oslo and the University of British Columbia. In 2004 she was the Kate Stoneman Endowed Visiting Professor in Law and Democracy, at Albany Law School in New York. She taught in the Oxford-George Washington University International Human Rights Law Summer School Programme at Oxford University in July 2012. She sits on the Advisory Boards of Australian Feminist Law Journal, International Human Rights Law Review, Third World Legal Studies, The London Review of International Law, Melbourne Journal of International Law, and The Third World and International Law. She has also been active in a number of human rights NGOs including Women’s Rights Action Network Australia (WRANA), Women’s Economic Equality Project (WEEP) Canada, International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW-AP) Malaysia, and International Women’s Tribune Centre (IWTC) New York. Through her NGO involvement, she helped draft a General Comment on women’s equality for the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and a General Recommendation on treaty obligations for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. She was a member of the Expert Panel at the Asia-Pacific Regional Women’s Hearing on Gender-Based Violence in Conflict held in Phnom Penh in 2012 and a member of the Judicial Council of the Women’s Court: Feminist Justice held in Sarajevo in 2015. In 2020 she prepared an amicus brief for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in the case of Rosanna Flamer-Caldera v Sri Lanka (2022).

Memberships and affiliations

• Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law
• American Society of International Law
• International Law Association