الدكتورة روث بريتل

Lecturer 
Leicester Law School

Research Area(s): Refugee and Asylum-Seeking Children, Migration, Right to Education, Best Interests of The Child, Child Protection and Safeguarding

Legal Experience: Ruth is a qualified solicitor and an experienced litigator.  Her practice focused on complex multi-party claims on behalf of local authority clients and their insurers.  She was the legal advisor to a public liability insurer at the North Wales Tribunal of Inquiry (‘The Waterhouse Inquiry’), between February 1997 and May 1998.  She defended cases on behalf of local authorities involving historic child abuse in large local authority children's homes and institutions. Additionally, she has experience in handling cases involving abuse in foster care, sensitive child protection cases and claims by children with special educational needs.

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Education: Ruth has a PhD in law from the University of Nottingham which was funded by the AHRC/Midlands 4 Cities Partnership.  Her PhD focused on the child's right to protection in the context of asylum and refugee law; examining and analysing the normative content of the child's right to protection under international children's rights law and the operationalisation of the best interests principle in the context of international refugee law.   She has an LLB (Hons) from the University of Manchester and an LLM in Human Rights Law from the University of Nottingham.

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Work: Ruth currently teaches Family Law, Law of Evidence, and Immigration law for Law, Justice and Society. Before working at Leicester, Ruth was a Lecturer in Law at Nottingham Trent University, where she taught immigration and asylum law, family law, international refugee law and human rights. Ruth is a legal advisor to the Nottingham Education Sanctuary Trust (NEST) which is an education provision for refugees and asylum seekers aged 15 to 19 in Nottingham.  She is also a trustee of Nottingham Arimathea Trust (NAT), which is an organisation providing accommodation to destitute asylum seekers and their families as well as temporary housing for newly recognised refugees.  Ruth is co-convenor (with fellow Child Rights ECR Network Member, Naomi Lott) of the SLSA Conference Children's Rights Stream.