CAHR PhD candidate receives prestigious award

Posted on 20 July 2015

Sherif Azer, PhD candidate at Centre for Applied Human Rights and the York Law School, has been awarded the prestigious Civil Society Scholar Award (CSSA) by Open Society Foundations.

Sherif Azer

The award supports international academic mobility to enable doctoral students and university faculty to access resources that enrich socially engaged research and critical scholarship. The competition was extremely rigorous, and the application was favorably reviewed by members of an international selection committee. Sherif has been awarded US$8,500 for fieldwork costs associated with his doctoral research.

Sherif's research focuses on cyberactivists in Egypt as human rights defenders, their vernacularization of international human rights law, and the role this played in the 2011 Revolution. This research investigates the influence of international human rights norms and values on Arab Spring revolutions. The research will also contribute analysis on new ways to protect human rights defenders who use the Internet.