Human rights elites at the United Nations: Felix Ermacora and the first human rights fact finding missions (1967-1993)
Dr Alvina Hoffman (Lecturer in Diplomatic Studies at SOAS University of London)
Wednesday, 29 October 2025, 5pm to 6pm
Seminar Room 1, Oxford Department of International Development, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB
RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas term 2025
Series convened by Professor Tom Scott-Smith and Professor Catherine Briddick
About this talk
The talk is part of a draft chapter of a book manuscript on human rights elites at the United Nations, which follows the biographical trajectories of UN experts in special human rights missions. It will focus on Felix Ermacora, an Austrian human rights expert, international lawyer and delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, who was part of the first cohort of independent human rights experts at the UN. For 27 years, he served on various human rights fact-finding missions at the UN: the first one on apartheid in South Africa, followed by the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Chile and Afghanistan. He established himself as Austria’s leading human rights expert in the 1950s through his academic work and passionate advocacy for the rights of the German-speaking minority in South Tyrol. The chapter builds on his travelogues, interviews with his widow and a former student, as well as archival sources from the UN and in Innsbruck. It highlights the tensions between state diplomacy and experts, headquarters and encounters in the field with dissidents, refugees and politicians, bureaucracy and adventure, and a sense of futility and deep belief in the cause – laying the foundations for today’s UN special procedures system.
About the speaker
Dr Alvina Hoffmann is a lecturer in Diplomatic Studies and Deputy Director of the Centre of International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London. Her research and teaching interests are in human rights and humanitarianism, the sociology of elites and experts, transnational professionals, socio-legal studies and the UN. Currently, she is working on her first monograph titled Speaking for the Universal: Human Rights Elites in World Politics. Her research has recently appeared in the Review of International Studies, European Journal of International Relations, and Global Studies Quarterly. She won the Best Article in the European Journal of International Relations in 2024 prize, the International Studies Association Theory Section Best Article in 2024, and the Best Dissertation prize of the German United Nations Association in 2023. She holds a PhD in International Relations from King’s College London, a Master’s in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action from Sciences Po Paris and an MSc in International Relations from LSE.
The seminar will be followed by drinks in the Hall.
Registration not required.
All enquiries should be directed to rsc-outreach@qeh.ox.ac.uk.