Faculty Leaders

Helen Stacy

Director of the Program on Human Rights in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Helen Stacy is senior fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies where she directs the Program on Human Rights. She is also affiliated faculty at Stanford Law School, a researcher with the Europe Center Forum at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and is associated with the Center for African Studies.

As a scholar of international and comparative law, human rights, and legal philosophy, Professor Stacy examines how to best promote human rights  given the range of different cultural, religious and political values among countries and regions.  Her recent work has focused on regional and sub-regional human rights courts in Africa, and her current work examines human trafficking in Africa and in South-East Asia, especially Burma, Thailand and southern China.

Before joining Stanford, she taught at Queensland University of Technology School of Law, was a senior prosecutor for the director of public prosecutions in London conducting trials for charges of murder, manslaughter, multiple rape, and terrorism, and before that, she was an in-house lawyer for Shell Oil in Australia.  In her spare time, she shows her horse Adagio on the dressage competition circuit.