Contribute To The Blog
Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Oxford Human Rights Hub Blog.
Please read the OxHRH Blog guidelines before submitting a proposed blog to us.
We welcome original contributions which provide high quality legal analysis of recent human rights law developments across the globe, including case law, current litigation, legislation, policy-making and activism.
Contributions that do not comply with our submission guidelines will not be considered by the editorial team. We look forward to receiving your contributions and thank our contributors in advance for helping us maintain our high standards and ensuring that the Blog is a space where authors can share their work with a wide global audience.
Who Can Contribute?
Guidelines For Contributions
Formatting and general guidelines
- Posts must be between 500-700 words in length.
- Posts which are longer than 700 words will not be considered for publication.
- Posts must include hyperlinks to relevant legal sources and background information, including any judgments, laws, treaties or other legal texts which are mentioned. Hyperlinks must link only to legal or respected news sources. The editors make the final decision over what constitutes a respectable source. Please do not use footnotes.
Style
- Posts titles should be informative and grab the reader’s attention. A reader should be able to tell what the post is about from the title. Titles should be as brief as possible.
- Examples of strong titles:
- ‘The Forgotten I in LGBTQIA+: ECtHR Turns its Back on Intersex People’;
- ‘Equality Doesn’t Always Mean Integration: The Right to Education for Neurodiverse People’
- Your first paragraph is a lede, which should grab the reader’s attention and be a strong snapshot of the core of your argument such that it will convince readers to read onwards. Please avoid the overused formulas of “this post considers”, “this post will argue/examine”…
- Example of an excellent lede: ‘In the ‘global north’, successive waves of anti-refugee policies have so eroded the institution of asylum that it almost seems lost. The EU’s response to the unprecedented number of refugees from Ukraine demonstrates what it, and the UK, can and should do for all those fleeing war and persecution..’ See Mobility and Sanctuary: How to Revive Asylum in Europe
- Posts should be clear and concise, leaving out excessive jargon. They should be easily understandable to readers with no legal background. Please avoid using phrases in Latin or other languages where this is not absolutely necessary.
- Examples of complex legal ideas effectively summarised:
- Blog Example 1 – The Forgotten I in LGBTQIA+: ECtHR Turns its Back on Intersex People
- Blog Example 2 – Equality Doesn’t Always Mean Integration: The Right to Education for Neurodiverse People
- Blog Example 3 – The ‘Colston Four’ and the Walls of Criminal Trials
- Blog Example 4 – Karnataka Hijab Ban Series – Part 1; Part 2; Part 3
- Blog Example 5 – Delhi High Court Marital Rape Judgment Analysis – Part 1 and Part 2.
- Posts should avoid long paragraphs and can include subheadings to organise ideas and improve readability.
- Posts which are submitted must be fully proofread and must conform to good legal academic style and the principles of Plain English legal writing. Posts that contain multiple grammatical or stylistic errors will not be reviewed.
Content
- Post must provide a legal analysis; the Blog is not a platform for opinion pieces.
- Posts should deal with latest legal developments, such as, recent judgments, legislation etc. A publishable blog will capture the legal nuances of the judgment or legislation.
- Submissions that are merely descriptive will not be accepted.
- Authors should consider writing on topics that they are expert in, or that holds a significant research interest for them. Authors should consider writing on jurisdictions that they are familiar with.
- As we have a global legal readership, posts should provide relevant background information to make them accessible to readers from outside of that country.
- Posts should reflect original, unpublished work.
Other
- Blog posts are published in English but we are always trying to reach a global audience. If you can provide us with a translated version such as, in Spanish, Portuguese or French, we would be most keen to publish this alongside the English version.
- Using email tracking software is strongly discouraged as we view it as a violation of our privacy. The Editors may, in their absolute discretion, reject submissions which use such software.
- Cross-posting or publication on other platforms is permissible only:
with the permission of the Editors of the OxHRH Blog; and
– a minimum of 48 hours after the post has been published on the OxHRH Blog.
Dialogue and promotion
Contributor’s Agreement
The Process of Publishing
If you would like to contribute to the blog, we’d be thrilled to receive your submission! Please either click the ‘contribute now’ button below, to to complete our submission form, or email your draft blog to oxfordhumanrightshub@law.ox.ac.uk, including your blog title and your name in the subject line. If you would like your blog piece to include a photo and a short biography, please include this information in your submission email.
The editors will not approve posts in advance of seeing the text. If you are unsure whether a topic is suitable for the blog or would like to pitch an idea for a blogpost not yet drafted, please email oxfordhumanrightshub@law.ox.ac.uk. An indication by our Editorial Team that a topic may be suitable does not amount to advance acceptance of the post.
Once you have submitted your draft post, the Editors will be in touch. Please give our Editors time to review your submission. We endeavour to respond quickly to Blog submissions and you can anticipate a response within a week. Please refrain from contacting our Editorial team for an update before a week has elapsed.
Acceptances / Rejections
If the Editors decide to accept a Blog post, that will be communicated to you by email. If the post is accepted for publication, there may be a delay between acceptance and publication. We aim to minimise this where a post covers a very recent or urgent issue. However, please be aware that the proliferation of human rights developments around the world makes it hard to give a firm guide as to when posts will be published. We will always work with authors to try and comply with any specific timing requests.
If the Editors reject a Blog submission, they will communicate that decision by email. Please be aware that there are significant demands on our Editorial Team and the Blog as a global platform, as we cover legal developments from a diverse range of jurisdictions and issues. These criteria will be taken into account in deciding whether to accept or reject a blog submission, and this means that our Editors may need to reject some submissions to ensure that we have a suitable range of coverage in terms of legal issues and jurisdictions.
Please do not amend and resubmit a blog that has been rejected. We are sorry that our Editors will not be able to carry out any further reviews of rejected drafts.
Invitations to Revise and Re-submit
If the Editors consider that your post has the potential to be published, but is not currently of the required standard, then we will send back your work with editorial suggestions, inviting you to revise the draft and re-submit an amended version. This does not amount to acceptance of the revised post, and the Editorial Team may decide that the revised post is not suitable for publication on the Blog. If our Editors invite you to revise and resubmit your draft blogpost, they will engage in, at most, one further review following re-submission. If the submission is deemed not suitable for publication following this review, our Editors must reject the piece at that point. If you feel unable to accept the Editor’s suggested edits after discussion, or do not wish to participate in the editorial process, then you are free to withdraw your submission.
The Editors may, in their absolute discretion, waive any of the above rules or amend this process.