Rose-Marie Belle Antoine is Study Abroad Visiting Scholar

Award-winning author and human rights advocate Dr. Rose-Marie Belle Antoine will give two public presentations at Washburn University School of Law this week. She will present "Caribbean Human Rights" at noon on Thursday, April 7, 2011 in Room 102. On Friday, April 8 at 10:30 a.m., she will present "The Barbados Legal System" in Room 120. Professor Antoine's presentations are part of the visiting scholar program at Washburn Law and are sponsored by the law school's Summer Study Abroad Program.

Antoine is professor of labor and off-shore law at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Barbados, teaching numerous courses, including discrimination in employment, comparative labor law, law and legal systems, and offshore financial law. She also serves as the dean of outreach.

Professor Antoine has focused her law career on human rights issues, saying human rights "is the core of a just society and a living, transformational vehicle that must impact every sphere of human endeavor for the uplifting of mankind." She currently advises the U.K. Government on key human rights and constitutional issues, including human trafficking, immigration, national security, citizenship, and health rights. Recently, she was invited by the U.S. Government to share her technical expertise in defining a developmental agenda for HIV in the multi-lingual Caribbean.

Antoine earned her doctorate in law from Balliol College, University of Oxford, her master of law degree from the University of Cambridge, and bachelor of law degree from the UWI. She also holds a diploma in International Human Rights Law from the International Institute of Human Rights/ECHR, Strasbourg, France. As a young attorney at the largest firm in London, Clifford Chance, she participated in the first ever pro bono cases from the Caribbean on death row appeals to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, giving advice and leading the research on key issues of Caribbean human rights and international human rights law. Professor Antoine is a founding member of the Barbados Coalition against Sexual Harassment and was active in the foundational activities of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, an organization dedicated to gender equality in the region.

As early as 1968, Washburn recognized that the practice of law was becoming increasingly global and responded with a summer study abroad program. Currently, Washburn Law expands students' understanding of different legal systems through its summer program at The University of the West Indies on Barbados and its semester-long program at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Posted April 6, 2011.