After Nato jets bombed Serbian state radio and television (RTS) in Belgrade in 1999, killing 16 technicians and editors, it was a British lawyer, Françoise Hampson, who took on the relatives’ quest for legal redress.
Hampson, who has died aged 74 of lung cancer, had the unusual distinction of being a prominent expert in both human rights and international humanitarian law – the rules of armed conflict.
The air raid during the Kosovo war, justified by Nato as necessary to silence President Slobodan Milosevic’s “propaganda”, raised the crucial issue of whether the European court of human rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg had jurisdiction to hear the claim.
Hampson, who had previously argued cases challenging territorial limits of responsibility for military operations, was also an authority on the principle of proportionality in war – the balancing of military advantage against civilian suffering.
As professor of international law of armed conflicts and human rights at Essex University, she was at ease both in rarefied courtroom exchanges over legal abstractions and out in the field interviewing witnesses to possible war crimes.
In Bosnia, Turkey and sub-Saharan Africa, she gathered evidence first-hand to present to courts. Among colleagues she was renowned for the intensity of her case preparations, often reading through the night to master legal details. She was a “whirlwind”, they said, with an “infinite capacity for work” who could bring clarity to the most complex ideas.
Several of her cases set legal precedents. In Aydin v Turkey – brought on behalf of a Kurdish woman who had been blindfolded, beaten and abused in police detention – the ECHR ruled for the first time that rape constituted an act of torture under article 3 of the European convention on human rights.
The RTS case, known as Bankovic v Belgium and others, however, did not result in victory for Hampson and those representing the Belgrade victims. Advocates for 17 Nato European member nations, including the UK, disputed the case’s admissibility.
The court found that aerial bombardment did not fall within the definition of state control for the purpose of convention rights. The damaged RTS building today remains unreconstructed as a memorial to the attack. The jurisdiction of international courts over military operations abroad continues to be fiercely debated.
Born in Bolton, Françoise was the daughter of Norman Hampson, a historian of the French Revolution, and Jacqueline (née Gardin), a French-born teacher. Her parents met through his military service as liaison officer on a Free French warship; a shipmate suggested Norman visit his sister in Paris on his way home after the second world war in 1945.
Jacqueline, one side of whose family were Jewish, had survived the occupation despite Nazi attempts to arrest her grandfather. Another relative was a senior judge. That family history influenced Françoise’s decision to pursue human rights law.
She attended first Manchester high school for girls then Dame Allan’s school in Newcastle as the family moved around northern universities. She initially read French at University College London, but switched after a year to study law at Newcastle University, and was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn.
In 1975, she became a law lecturer at Dundee University, remaining there until 1983, when she transferred to the University of Essex, where its specialist courses in law and human rights were gaining an international reputation. She worked alongside the other professors there, Sir Nigel Rodley and Kevin Boyle, on cases at the European court of human rights.
With Boyle, she pursued cases of torture, murder and enforced disappearances against Turkey brought on behalf of the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project. She derived great satisfaction from helping families from remote villages pursue justice in the highest international courts in Europe. Boyle and Hampson were jointly named lawyer of the year in 1998, an award made by Liberty and the Law Society Gazette to mark the 50th anniversary of the UN declaration of human rights.
Hampson also served as an independent expert member of the UN sub-commission on the promotion and protection of human rights (1998-2007). In 2005, she was appointed OBE for services to international law and to human rights.
For years she taught at military staff colleges in the UK, US, Canada and Ghana as well as at the International Institute of Humanitarian Law in Sanremo, Italy, which runs courses for officers and legal advisers from around the world. Her enthusiasm for engaging with the military on issues such as targeting and detention was widely appreciated. She was also a consultant on international humanitarian law to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
In 2011, she retired from teaching but continued working – drafting submissions to parliament’s joint committee on human rights, providing expert evidence to the ECHR on the Georgia/Russia conflict, exploring the battlefield implications of autonomous weapon systems as well as travelling to Africa as a member of the UN commission of inquiry on Burundi to investigate complaints of human rights abuses.
An inspirational figure to generations of students, she could appear intimidating to those not fully prepared for legal argument. Those she trusted were rewarded with warm friendships and an irreverent sense of humour: a favourite T-shirt depicted a cow manacled to the wall bearing the legend “The terrible truth about whipped cream”.
Her legal papers were recently transferred to the archives of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at Galway University. Away from law, she loved giving dinner parties and escaping into the garden of her Colchester home.
She is survived by her younger sister, Michèle.
