Murray Hunt

Murray Hunt is Director of the Policy and Evidence Centre on Modern Slavery and Human Rights and a Visiting Professor in Human Rights Law in the Faculty of Law.

Murray is a human rights lawyer with a strong interest in bridging the divide between academic research on human rights and human rights law and policy. Murray is also working as an Independent Advisor to provide legal and policy advice on matters relating to the rule of law. 

As an author and lecturer, a practising barrister and a former Legal Adviser to the UK Parliament’s Human Rights Committee, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Murray has first hand experience of the worlds of academic research, legal practice and the making of law and policy.  These experiences helped him identify a significant gap in the research ecosystem – the infrastructure to ensure that human rights policy is properly informed by robust research, evidence and independent expert analysis.

His role as a human rights adviser to Parliament during the passage of the Modern Slavery Act and related legislation, and in connection with parliamentary inquiries into human trafficking, the treatment of asylum seekers, migration and the role of business in relation to human rights, and his track record as a researcher on human rights policy, led AHRC to appoint him to lead the UK’s first Policy and Evidence Centre focused on an area of human rights policy.

His parliamentary work with politicians from all parties has helped the Policy and Evidence Centre to continue to command cross-party support even as the policy area has become increasingly politically contested.  It has worked closely with ministers from both Conservative and Labour Governments and conducted the Scoping Study and other preparatory work which helped former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May to establish the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking.

Murray is particularly interested in developing an explicitly human rights-based approach to modern slavery policy, and in the wider implications of such an approach for other areas of policy.  He is also interested in building on the experience of the current Policy and Evidence Centre to develop the research-policy infrastructure in other areas of human rights policy. 

More details of Murray’s legal career and policy background can be found on his Law Faculty webpage.