Doughty Street Chambers Children’s Rights Group Annual Children’s Rights Lecture 2025

Professor Ben Saul is Challis Chair of International Law at the University of Sydney and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism. He has taught at Harvard, Oxford, The Hague and Xiamen Academies of International Law, and in Italy, India, Nepal, and Cambodia. He has been a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute for International Law and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights. He has published 20 books and hundreds of scholarly articles, including the books Defining Terrorism in International Law (2006), the Oxford Commentary on the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2014) (awarded a Certificate of Merit by the American Society of International Law), Research Handbook on International Law and Terrorism (2020), and Oxford Guide to International Humanitarian Law (2020). He is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of Law, and formerly an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague. Ben has advised United Nations bodies, governments, militaries and security agencies, and NGOs; practiced in international tribunals; undertaken missions in over 45 countries; and appears frequently in the international media, including writing opinion for The New York Times. He has a doctorate from Oxford and honours degrees in Arts and Law from Sydney.

Maryam is a popular choice amongst lay and professional clients for her detailed preparation, fearless advocacy in court and personable nature. She is a compassionate listener who fights for her clients with determination and gets great results.

Maryam has experience in a wide range of criminal offences. As a led junior, Maryam is instructed in cases involving homicide, firearms, terrorism and large scale fraud. As leading counsel, she has defended in cases of serious violence, conspiracy to supply firearms, politically motivated offending from terrorism to protest, financial crime, fraud and regulatory matters, sexual offences, drugs supply conspiracies and kidnapping.

She worked on several high-profile terrorism cases during her secondment with Reprieve, representing leaders of political parties sanctioned as terrorists by the UN, US and UK. She was part of a team that brought the first due process challenge in the US against the inclusion of a US citizen on a “Kill List”, whilst reporting on the conflict in Syria. She has experience in cases involving legal challenges to the use of state extra-judicial killing by drones and/or mercenaries. She assists individuals challenging their listing by the UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee.

Maryam is experienced in advising on appeals against conviction and sentence before the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal.

Dr Fatima Ahdash is an Assistant Professor of Law at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha. Previously, Fatima was a Lecturer in Law at Goldsmiths, University of London. Fatima’s research interests lie in national security, family law, child rights and human rights and their various interactions. In 2024, she was awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association's Article Prize for her article entitled 'Countering Terrorism in the Family Courts: A Dangerous Development, published in the Modern Law Review. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE) where she was awarded the Modern Law Review prize. Fatima has worked with national and international NGOs including Rights and Security International and Reprieve in the area of national security and accountability. She holds an LLM in Human Rights Law and an LLB also from the LSE.

Leo Ratledge is a Co-Director of the Child Rights International Network (CRIN). He leads on legal and policy work within CRIN. He has worked on children's rights in the context of counter-terrorism since 2012, including through the organisation's global campaign to end the death penalty and life sentencing of children and its international survey on counter-terrorism legislation. CRIN's forthcoming publication To Protect or Punish? Children, counter-terrorism and the criminal justice system addresses the impact of counter-terrorism on children within the criminal justice system in the UK.

Zaynab Mayladan is a Lebanese journalist, and humanitarian communications and media professional working across conflict and displacement contexts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Over the past six years, she has documented the lives of children and families affected by war, forced migration, and crises in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Türkiye, Moldova, Ukraine, Poland. Her work brings together journalism and visual storytelling to create advocacy pieces that move between the field and the international stage. By combining portraits, testimonies, and immersive experiences, she seeks to give visibility to survivors whose stories rarely cross borders, insisting that they be seen not as statistics but as individuals. 

Read more about Zaynab here.

Aoife Nolan is an internationally recognised expert in human rights law, with a particular focus on economic and social rights and children's rights. Aoife Co-leads Doughty Street Chambers' Children's Rights Group and is a member of the Doughty Street International Steering Group. She is Professor of International Human Rights Law at the School of the Law, University of Nottingham, where she is also Director of the Human Rights Law Centre's Economic and Social Rights Unit. Aoife is President of the Council of Europe's European Committee of Social Rights, the leading European monitoring mechanism on economic and social rights, having joined the Committee in 2017 and served as Vice-President in 2021-2.

Read the full profile here.