Cities and Human Rights

Marius Pieterse is a Professor in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he teaches urban and local government law, constitutional law and human rights law. He writes on constitutional law dimensions of local (urban) governance and on various aspects of social and economic rights. His current project concerns how urban conditions and contemporary urban governance challenges are contributing to the development of new human rights and the transformation of existing human rights. While at UCL, he is specifically considering the urban evolution of the rights to health and to freedom of religion. He is hosted by Jeff King at the GCDC from 1 September until 31 October 2025.

Elena De Nictolis is Assistant Professor (Research) at Luiss University in Rome and a Visiting Fellow at NYU Law School's Guarini Center on Environmental Law. She holds a degree in Politics and Government and a PhD in Political Theory from Luiss University and is currently an LL.M candidate at the London School of Economics. Prior to joining Luiss, she was a Hauser Global Fellow at New York University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University. Elena's research interests include local government law and public law, examining questions of devolution through constitutional, administrative, and comparative legal perspectives.

Virginia Mantouvalou is Professor of Human Rights and Labour Law at UCL and Co-Director of the UCL Institute for Human Rights. She has published widely on human rights, including Structural Injustice and Workers’ Rights (OUP 2023), Human Rights at Work (with A Bogg, H Collins and ACL Davies, Hart, 2024), and Structural Injustice and the Law (co-edited with Jonathan Wolff; UCL Press 2024). Her research has been cited in judicial decisions, including by the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of South Africa. She has acted as an adviser to the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights, the ILO and the Council of Europe.

With its wide range of activities the Institute leads academic impact and engagement on global human rights issues. The Institute's focus is on human rights standard-setting, interpretation and application, in both the international and domestic context. Its mission is to contribute to UCL's role as a global university. Read more about the group and its work.

The Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, based at the UCL Faculty of Laws, seeks to advance scholarly understanding of the relationship between democratic government and the rule of law in domestic, comparative, and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on identifying the supporting conditions for constitutional resilience in electorally competitive political systems. Read more about the group and its work.