Marius is a professor of law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he teaches urban and local government law, constitutional law and human rights law. His research focuses on urban governance, local government law and the realisation of socio-economic rights in an urban context.
Having done a lot of work on how different human rights are enforced in and through cities, Marius is currently considering how such enforcement is complicated and transformed by the overarching context of the climate-change-induced “polycrisis”.
His talk “Urban Collectives as Victims of International Human Rights Violations” grappled with some of the difficulties in representing collective urban human rights violations (such as those suffered when cities are the cites for calamitous events caused by public negligence, the sites of armed conflict or the sites of environmental devastation) before human rights tribunals in the international, European, Inter-American and African human rights systems.