Intersectional Class Discrimination

Professor Emerita Geraldine Van Bueren KC Queen Mary University of London is an Hon. Senior Fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. She is a barrister in Doughty Street Chambers and was appointed an honorary Kings Counsel in recognition of her scholastic contributions to national and international law. She has served as a Commissioner on the United Kingdom’s Equality and Human Rights Commission with lead responsibility for human rights and on the Attorney-General’s International Pro Bono Committee.

In 2003, she was awarded the Child Rights Lawyer Award, which. recognises lawyers who have done outstanding work in the field of children’s rights.She is one of the original drafters of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and also helped draft the United Nations Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty, the UNHCR Guidelines on Refugee Children and the United Nations Programme of Action on Children in the Criminal Justice System.She has represented the United Nations in discussions with Iran; the Commonwealth Secretariat in Bangladesh and advised the Government of Japan and Unicef. She has also acted as an expert witness for the Government of Canada and has lectured and worked throughout Europe and the United States and in Argentina, Senegal, Uganda and Venezuela. From 2002 to 2006 Professor Van Bueren held a second concurrent chair the W P Schreiner Professor, Professor of International Human Rights Law at the University of Cape Town.

She chairs the Chair of the Association of Working Class Academics, edited Law’s Duty to the Poor for UNESCO, and is currently completing a monograph Class and Law (Hart).

Beth Goldblatt is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia and a Visiting Professor in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is an international expert on social and economic rights and equality and non-discrimination law. Much of her work concerns gender disadvantage and the role of equality in addressing economic inequality. Beth established the UTS Faculty of Law’s large and active Feminist Legal Research Group and she teaches ‘Gender and the Law’. She chairs the Faculty’s Equity and Diversity Group. Beth is a member of the Australian Discrimination Law Experts Group. Her work covers many aspects of equality with a recent focus on climate change, its impact on inequality, and the role of law in contributing to climate justice. She is the co-director of the BCCE working group on Climate Equality.

Kadriye Bakirci is a Law Professor, a Research Fellow, and the Administrator and Researcher of the Commission on Sustainability Data at Kellogg College Oxford University. She is a Certified Lawyer and a member of the Ankara Bar Association; a Council of Europe Certified Tutor for the Training of the Trainers for the COE Programme on Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals; National Expert for the European Labour Law Network and a National Expert for the European Network of Legal Experts in Gender Equality and Non-Discrimination.

She is a holder of an endorsement as an Exceptional Talent by the British Academy, an Outstanding Paper Award 2023 from Emerald Publishing, a Plaque of Honour from the Ankara Bar Association for her contribution to women’s human rights, Visiting Fellowships by Wolfson College (Cambridge University), and Kellogg College (Oxford University).

She is an Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Discrimination and the Law (UK), Journal of Money Laundering Control (UK), Pravni Vjesnik Journal of Law and Social Sciences of the Faculty of Law Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek (Croatia) and Advisory Board Member of Economics and Society Journal (Turkiye). 

She is a Founding Member and a current member of the Advisory Board of the Women’s Studies Centre in Science, Engineering, and Technology of Istanbul Technical University; a member of the Ankara Bar Association Center for Legal Aid for the Victims of Violence; a member of the Scientific and Advisory Board of the Associated Metal Workers Union (Istanbul), and a founding member or a member of various international and domestic scientific and occupational organisations, and human, women’s, and children’s rights networks/groups.

Dr Angelo Capuano is a law lecturer at Central Queensland University. He holds a BCL from Oxford University and a PhD from Monash University, and has received numerous scholarships including a
Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship to study at Oxford. His research investigates the transformative effects of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms and other technologies on workplace
equality and access to employment, focusing on class, ‘social origin’, race and disability discrimination (and their intersections).

Angelo’s monograph, Class and Social Background Discrimination in the Modern Workplace: Mapping Inequality in the Digital Age, was published by Bristol University Press in 2023. His research has also been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals, including articles in the UNSW Law Journal.

Beyond academia, Angelo’s work has influenced jurisprudence, legal practice, and court and tribunal decisions internationally. Notably, his work on the concept of ‘social origin’ in discrimination law has been cited with approval in majority judgments of superior courts in South Africa (such as a majority decision by eight judges of the Constitutional Court and a unanimous decision by three judges of the Labour Appeal Court) and in a decision of the Australian Fair Work Commission. Furthermore, in modern slavery litigation, the Fair Work Ombudsman relied upon his work on this topic in pleadings which were accepted by the Federal Court of Australia. Angelo’s work has also been used by
government bodies including the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia and the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency of Germany.

Angelo enriches his academic work with years of practical experience, having been previously employed as a government lawyer, legal researcher and judge’s associate. Drawing on his combined academic and practical experience he has delivered implicit-bias training on a consultancy basis to Commonwealth government employees, including members of the Administrative Review Tribunal.