Foreword

Academic publishing is broken. Academics carry out research and write papers, chapters, books; they edit the books and peer review them. Then they hand that work to a publisher, who typesets the research and sells it back to students, libraries and even the academics themselves. Academic publishers have huge profit margins and actually charge universities to make research open access. This is often research that their own staff have created. In our contact with scholars and students, particularly from developing countries, they often observe how challenging it is to access good academic resources. Legal academic journals and databases are behind paywalls and libraries in their areas are underfunded or lack access to expensive databases like Westlaw and LexisNexis. Educational resources should not be like this. It is a serious barrier to higher education and more broadly to diversification in the academy. It is a bad deal for academics, it is a bad deal for students, it is a bad deal for universities and it does not have to be this way. We did not become academics to line the pockets of big academic publishers. We became academics because we enjoy learning, we enjoy research and we enjoy imparting and sharing knowledge with others and publishing should facilitate, not hinder, that end.

This textbook was written by a team of human rights law experts and peer reviewed by independent experts in the field. It offers students across the world access to information even if they cannot afford a textbook. Where universities cannot afford or maintain subscriptions to academic publishers, educators can use this book for teaching on human rights courses.  Open Access publishing also allows us to update the book with new information to react and comment quickly on new developments in human rights law. The book is designed around 3 core ideas –

1. Free – completely free for students, teachers, practitioners, whoever. It is published under a Creative Commons license.
2. Concise – the chapters should be manageable to read with most chapters coming in around 10,000 words.
3. Open access – there should be no further barriers (e.g. paywalls) to using the textbook. Anyone with an internet connection should be able to access it and its sources. The sources we use are open access, which has been, by far, the most difficult part of writing this book. Our amazing research assistants have helped us enormously with this task, including by creating an open access bibliography, which should serve as a very useful resource for students and educators alike carrying out research in this area.

International Human Rights Law is supposed to be universal and we believe knowledge and understanding of it should be universal too. People should be informed about their rights so that they can hold their governments to account. Open Access publishing is a vital tool in ensuring universal access to information about human rights. We hope this textbook inspires the next generation of human rights advocates, lawyers and academics. Working on this textbook has been an inspiring experience. Academics at all stages of their careers, PhD students, master’s students and undergraduate students have worked together to produce a comprehensive human rights textbook. This book has already received multiple awards for student-staff collaboration. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we have enjoyed working on it.

Stuart Wallace and Clare James

7th July 2026