prof. mr. dr. B.C.A. (Brigit) Toebes

Groningen - Prof. Brigit Toebes is employed by the University of Groningen Faculty of Law since January 2012. Since September 2018, she holds the Chair Health Law in a Global Context at the Department of Transboundary Legal Studies. As from September 2022, she is scientific director of the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health.  Her research focuses on the field of international health law (see under Research). For this she established the Groningen Centre for Health Law (first as Global Health Law Groningen), a research centre that addresses the intersection between public international law and the protection of health. She teaches public international law, international health law, and human rights law. She also advises governmental and non-governmental bodies on the international law dimensions in their research and public health policies (e.g. World Health Organization and UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health).

Copenhagen - in 2008 Brigit moved to Copenhagen, where among other research projects she was the managing editor of a book entitled ‘Health and human rights in Europe’ (Intersentia, 2012), which built on a collaboration between six  scholars from across northern Europe. She worked as an external lecturer at Copenhagen University (the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health), Lund University (Sweden), Reykjavik University (Iceland) and the University of Bergen (Norway - ongoing). At the University of Copenhagen, she set up a course entitled 'Health and Human Rights'. She was consultant to various organisations including the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the WHO.

Aberdeen -  in 2004 Brigit moved to Aberdeen where she joined the University of Aberdeen School of Law as a Lecturer. Here she developed her expertise in the field of ‘health and human rights’. She was a lecturer in the following courses: public international law (LLB), international human rights law (LLM) and intellectual property law and development (LLM) and her own Honours course 'Health and Human Rights'.

The Hague - after the PhD research Brigit moved to The Hague where she was employed by the T.M.C. Asser Instituut for International Law as a Researcher and Research-Coordinator and as a Legislative Advisor at the Netherlands Council of State. Among other projects, she was involved in advising on the reorganisation of the Dutch health care system and on the Dutch system of financial supervision.

Brigit started her career at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (Utrecht University) in the 1990s. Here she conducted a PhD research into the definition of health as a human right ('The Right to Health as a Human Right in International Law', Intersentia 1999). For this research, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health. A Russian translation of the book was funded by the Open Society Foundations.