Anne Bayefsky is a lawyer specializing in International Law and Human Rights Law. She is President and Editor of HumanRightsVoices.org and Director, Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.
From 2001 to 2004 she was a visitor at Columbia University Law School. From 2004 to 2005 she was a visitor at Metropolitan College of New York. She is on leave from York University, Toronto, Canada. In January 2003 she launched www.bayefsky.com, a major human rights website dedicated to enhancing the implementation of international human rights legal standards in every state.
Professor Bayefsky served with the Canadian delegation to the UN General Assembly in 1984 and 1989, and the Commission on Human Rights from 1993 to 1997. She also served on a number of delegations to the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women and the 2001 Durban Racism Conference. She was a member of the External Research Advisory Committee of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from 1996-1998, and a member of the Advisory Panel of UNDP on the UN Development Report for 2000. From 1998 to 2001 she worked in collaboration with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on a review of the UN human rights treaty system, authoring a major report on the reform of the treaty system in 2001. She is a member of the International Law Association Committee on Human Rights Law and Practice, and Editor-in-Chief of the series "Refugees and Human Rights", published by Brill.
She holds a B.A., M.A. and LL.B. from the University of Toronto, an M.Litt. from Oxford University, and is a barrister and solicitor of the Ontario Bar.
