Murray Hunt

Murray Hunt has been a Visiting Professor in Human Rights Law in the Faculty of Law since 2011.   He is currently also Director of the Policy and Evidence Centre on Modern Slavery and Human Rights in the Humanities Division, which since 2019 has sought to generate actionable policy recommendations grounded in both evidence and human rights law in the particular policy area of modern slavery and human trafficking. Murray is also working with the Attorney General’s Office as an Independent Adviser to provide legal and policy advice on matters relating to the rule of law.

Murray has been the UK's alternate member of the Council of Europe's Commission for Democracy Through Law (the Venice Commission) since 2019.  In that capacity he is currently a member of the Working Group working on the review and updating of the Venice Commission’s Rule of Law Checklist.

Murray was previously Director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law from 2017 to 2024.  His vision for the Bingham Centre was to democratise the Rule of Law: to enhance its democratic legitimacy, and long term resilience, by building consensus about its meaning and importance beyond legal audiences, including in particular young people and parliamentarians.  He established the Centre’s Rule of Law Monitoring of Legislation Project, designed to involve parliamentarians directly in the scrutiny of the Rule of Law implications of Government Bills, and was Legal Adviser to the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Rule of Law, which he helped establish as a way of increasing Rule of Law literacy in Parliament.

Murray was the Legal Adviser to the Joint Committee on Human Rights of the UK Parliament from 2004 to 2017, advising the Committee and drafting reports to Parliament on the human rights compatibility of Government Bills, the implementation by the Government of human rights judgments (including judgments of the European Court of Human Rights), the UK’s compliance with international human rights treaties and significant human rights issues of national concern. Murray has also been a Special Adviser to the Human Rights and Equality Committee of the Scottish Parliament and was an independent member of Scotland’s National Taskforce for Human Rights Leadership from 2019-2021.

Before working in Parliament Murray was a practising barrister between 1993 and 2004 specialising in public law and human rights, acting both for and against public bodies.  As a barrister he appeared in numerous cases concerning human rights in both the European Court of Human Rights and the UK’s higher courts.  In 2000 he was a founding member of Matrix, a new legal practice which was brought into being to bring together expertise in fields of law such as international law and human rights which cut across the traditional dividing lines on which the practising Bar was organised.  Murray remains a member of Matrix, having rejoined when he left Parliament in 2017.  He is also a Bencher of the Middle Temple.

Murray’s academic publications cover a wide range of public law and human rights issues, but focus in particular on the national implementation of international human rights norms, the capacity of the common law to provide the necessary normative foundation for such national implementation, and the importance of democratic considerations in any contemporary account of public law and human rights.  Parliaments and Human Rights: Redressing the Democratic Deficit (2015), for example, is an edited collection of essays which seek to address directly the growing and genuinely-held concern, in the UK and elsewhere, that the institutional arrangements for the protection of human rights suffer from a democratic deficit, and considers how a more democratic model of human rights protection could be achieved.

Murray’s research interests as a Visiting Professor have focused on the role of parliaments in the protection and realisation of the rule of law and human rights.  From 2012 to 2019 he led an AHRC-funded research project on Parliaments, the Rule of Law and Human Rights which focused on strengthening the rule of law and human rights by finding ways of bringing them into the heart of the political process and embedding them in democratic institutions.  The project convened international conferences and UN side events on the subject, in collaboration with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Universal Rights Group, the Commonwealth, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, UN member states, and other partners.  One of the aims of the project was to build the international consensus necessary to underpin some internationally agreed principles on Parliaments and Human Rights. In 2018 a set of Draft Principles was published in a report to the UN Human Rights Council by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.  Murray also taught an annual seminar course on the role of parliaments in the European system of human rights protection on the Human Rights Law course.

The focus of Murray’s current work is how to rebuild the political consensus underpinning the foundational values of the Rule of Law, human rights and democracy in both the UK and the wider world, and thereby secure their long term resilience in the face of the existential threats they face in an age of populism; and how to develop the research and policy infrastructure so that it is capable of generating robust and reliable independent research, evidence and expert analysis to inform the innovative policies that are required to re-legitimate democratic values.

Murray studied law at Oxford (BA 1987 and BCL 1988) and Harvard Law School (LLM 1990).