Armi Beatriz E. Bayot

Armi Beatriz E. Bayot is a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Law student at the University of Oxford, where she is undertaking research on the human rights implications of intrastate peace agreements. Her research is being supervised by Professor Antonios Tzanakopoulos and is supported by grants from The Asia Foundation and the Oxford Faculty of Law.

Prior to her arrival at Oxford, she worked as a lawyer at the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) of the Philippines, first serving as Division Chief of the Center for Crisis, Conflict, and Humanitarian Protection of the CHR and later as the Deputy Coordinator of the National Task Force Against Extrajudicial Killings. She is the founding Head the CHR’s Analysis Unit, which is mandated to analyze the data produced by regional investigators, determine whether large-scale human rights violations are being committed, and to formulate strategic and policy responses to said abuses.

Prior to her work at the CHR, she was an Associate Solicitor at the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) of the Republic of the Philippines, where her fields of practice include indigenous peoples’ rights law, administrative law, family law, and criminal appeals. She was legal counsel to the government peace panel in talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) from 2010-2016 and was deeply involved in the drafting and negotiation of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) – a milestone peace agreement which aims to end the decades-long armed conflict in Mindanao. She was also the Government Alternate to the Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) (a key mechanism of the Bangsamoro peace process) from March to September 2016.

She obtained a Master of Laws Degree in Transnational Law (with Distinction) from King’s College London in 2015 under a Chevening Scholarship from the Government of the United Kingdom. She was awarded the Dickson Poon School of Law Prize in 2015 for obtaining the highest marks among her cohort on the Transnational Law pathway. She was also the sole winner of  the prestigious Georg Schwarzenberger Prize in International Law in 2016. She obtained her Juris Doctor degree from the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Law in 2009, where she was the recipient of various merit scholarships. She was a Senior Lecturer at UP Law, teaching Legal History and Administrative Law, from 2016 to 2018.