Başak Çalı is Professor in International Law at Koç University Law School. and Hertie School of Governance She holds a BA in International Relations from Ankara University Faculty of Political Science, an MA in International Peacekeeping from interdisciplinary Government-Law Programme from the University of Essex and a PhD in Laws from the University of Essex Law School specialising in international law. She was the Rubin Human Rights Fellow at UCL between 2002-2004, a lecturer in human rights at the Department of Political Science at UCL between 2004-2010 and senior lecturer (associate professor) at the same university between 2010-2013. Between 2010-2013 she was also the director of the MA in Human Rights at UCL. She held visiting posts at the University of Essex Law School, UN University for Peace, Costa Rica and at the Oxford University International Human Rights Law summer school. In 2002 she become a Council of Europe expert on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and trained judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and polie officers on the ECHR in Azerbaijan, Bosnia Herzegovina, Armenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Georgia, Serbia and Türkiye over a decade. She has also been involved in trainings on international human rights law for armed forces under the auspices of NATO. In 2014 she was elected as a board member of the European Society of International Law (ESIL) and became the society’s secretary-general in April 2015.

Dr. Çalı, is a fellow of the Essex Human Rights Centre, founding director of Judgment Watch, founding co-chair of the ESIL Interest Group on International Human Rights Law, academic advisory member of Universal Rights Group and an advisory member of the Türkiye Joint Human Rights Platform’s ECHR Judgment Implementation Project.

Her key areas of research interests include general international law and its theoretical foundations, international law of armed conflict and peacekeeping, international human rights law, the European Court of Human Rights and its jurisprudence, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, comparative human rights law, implementation of human rights judgments, the relationship between international law and domestic law, human rights in Türkiye, Europe and in the GCC states, qualitative empirical legal studies, law and sociology, law and anthropology, law and politics and legal research methods. Her research in these fields have been published in numerous international journals and have been supported by research funding agencies including the UK Economic Social Research Council, the Qatar National Fund for Research and the British Academy.

Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications

• The Authority of International Law: Obedience, Respect, and Rebuttal (Oxford University Press, 2015)
• Çalı, Ghanea and Jones, ‘Domestic Effects of Human Rights Treaty Ratification in the Member States of the Gulf Cooperation Council’, Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 38, Number 1, February 2016 pp. 21-5
• Çalı, ‘Comparing the Support of the EU and the US to International Human Rights Law qua International Human Rights Law: Worlds too Far Apart?’,
  International Journal of Constitutional Law (2015), Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 901-922.
• Çalı, The Execution of the Ataman Group Cases – A Monitoring Report (2015) İnsan Hakları Ortak Platformu
• Çalı and Koch, ‘Foxes Guarding the Foxes? Peer Review of Human Rights Judgments by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe’, Human Rights Law Review (2014) 14 (2): 301-325
• Çalı, Koch and Bruch, ‘ The Social Legitimacy of Human Rights Courts: A Grounded Interpretivist Theory of the Elite Accounts of the Legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights’, 35 (3) Human Rights Quarterly, (2013)
• Çalı, ‘Human Rights Treaties: Specialised Rules for Treaty Interpretation’ in Hollis ed., The Law of Treaties, Oxford University Press (2012) (Received the American Society of International Law Book Award)
• Çali, ‘The Logics of Supranational Human Rights Litigation, Official Acknowledgment and Human Rights Reform: The Southeast Türkiye cases before the European Court of Human Rights between 1996-2006’ Law and Social Inquiry, Volume 35 Issue 2 (Spring 2010), p 311-337.
• Çalı, ‘The Legitimacy of Human Rights Treaty Bodies: An Indirect Instrumentalist Defense’ in Follesdal and Ulfstein eds., The Legitimacy of Human Rights Treaties, Cambridge University Press
• Çali, ‘From Bangladesh to Responsibility to Protect: The Legality and Implementation Criteria for Humanitarian Intervention’ in Gilbert, Hampson and Sandoval eds., The Delivery of Human Rights, Routledge, 2010.
• Çalı, ‘Theories of International Relations in International Law’ in Çalı ed., International Law for International Relations, Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Basak Çali, ed., International Law for International Relations, (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Çali, ‘On Interpretivism and International Law’ European Journal of International Law, Vol. 20 (2009) No. 3, 805-822.
• Çali, ‘The Purposes of the European Human Rights System: One or Many?’ (2008) European Human Rights Law Review, Issue 3, pp. 299-306.
• Rodley and Çali, ‘Kosovo Revisited: Humanitarian Intervention on the Fault Lines of International Law’ Human Rights Law Review Volume 7, Number 2, 2007, pp. 275-297.
• Çali, ‘Balancing Human Rights: Methodological Problems with Weights, Scales and Proportions’ Human Rights Quarterly Volume 29, Number 1, 2007, pp. 251-270.
• Çali, Between Legal Cosmopolitanism and a Society of States: The Limits of International Justice at the European Court of Human Rights’ in Dembour and Kelly eds., Paths to International Justice: Social and Legal Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2007) pp. 111-133
• Çali, ‘Human Rights Discourse in Türkiye: Domestic Human Rights NGOs’ in Arat ed., Human Rights in Türkiye: Policies and Prospects (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) 217-232.Received the American Library Association Choice Award of Outstanding Academic Titles 2007.
• Meckled-Garcia and Başak Çali, eds., The Legalisation of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law, (Routledge, 2006).
• Çalı and Ergun, ‘Global Governance and Domestic Politics: Fragmented Visions’, in Lederer and Muller ed., Criticising Global Governance (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005) 161- 176.
• Çali, ‘Bargaining Transnationalism: The European Court of Human Rights’ Finnish Yearbook of International Law Volume XV, 2004, 111-128.

Başak Çalı
Director of Center for Global Public Law