Megan Campbell on women, poverty, and why international law still matters

There is something quietly disarming about the way Meghan Campbell traces her path to becoming one of Britain’s foremost human rights lawyers. You might expect a story steeped in early idealism, perhaps a childhood injustice, a formative mentor, or a precocious sense of vocation. Instead, she laughs and says it was television. 

“I watched a lot of Law and Order one summer and thought the lawyers looked really cool”, Campbell tells me. “I’m like, well, that sounds fun. I think I could do that. So really, it was Law and Order, not To Kill a Mockingbird.” She had written the latter on her university application forms, admitting that “it sounded like the right answer”, but the truth is rather more honest, and rather more human. 

Campbell is a Reader in International Human Rights Law at the University of Birmingham, where her research centres on women’s economic inequality: the structural, legal, and political forces that keep women poor. Her two monographs, Women, Poverty, Equality (2018) and the recently published Hanging in the Balance (2025), have established her as a leading voice in the field. She has advised the International Labour Organisation, the World Health Organisation, the Council of Europe, and the UK Cabinet Office. She is the Deputy Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub and hosts their RightsUp podcast. She is, by any measure, formidably accomplished. 

Campbell grew up in Canada, raised by parents who wanted her to be a pharmacist, thinking it would be a better route to economic security. She had other ideas: “I didn’t love math and science as much as I loved the idea of getting to play around with words and construct an argument and figure out how to be persuasive. That was very, very appealing to me.” After graduating from the University of Manitoba, the only law school in the province, Campbell completed her articling year with the Manitoba government and was called to the bar. She then worked as a criminal barrister, putting in 15 or 16 trials. She went to the Court of Appeal. She wore the robes. She stood in a beautiful old building and argued a sentencing appeal for a sexual assault case, and she loved every second of it. 

“It’s very thrilling to cross-examine somebody, to put a witness on the stand”, Campbell tells me. “After you’ve done it, you feel like you could just jog up and down Everest, such a high.” As a Junior Crown attorney, she was carrying five or six hundred files at a time – DUIs, house party assaults, drug offences – learning how to read a case, how to negotiate, how to build an argument from almost nothing. The technical rigour of DUI cases alone, she says, was excellent training: strict rules around self-incriminating evidence, precise timelines, no margin for error. “It’s a very good area to practise because you have to make sure you’re getting your ducks in a row.” 

The criminal bar gave her something else, too: a set of questions she couldn’t stop turning over. She could see, from inside the system, how structurally incapable it was of addressing the things that actually troubled her. Criminal law sees each case as an individual event: did this person commit this offence? It cannot look up and ask the harder question. Why is it always trans women being murdered? Why, in Canada, is it always indigenous women? 

“The criminal law isn’t meant to solve those larger societal patterns about why certain types of women are more vulnerable to violence”, she says: “And there’s still quite strong critique that the criminal law system revictimises victims of violence because its processes are not victim-centred. When you put a criminal trial in, it’s the Crown that puts the case in. The victim, they’re not in charge of how their story gets told.” 

Campbell was 23 years old. She told her boss she was going abroad for a year to Edinburgh, for a master’s, and would come back. They held her job. Instead, halfway through her master’s, she decided to apply for a doctorate at Oxford. She went for it, she says, because “you only live once, take the big swing, see what happens”. Many months later, they said, you are accepted: “I was like, what now? I could not and I still cannot fathom why.” She was baffled by the college system (“they all look the same to me”), and ended up at Pembroke entirely by chance. The next several years of her life were dedicated to trying to answer the question that had been gnawing at her since that junior posting in Winnipeg: why are women so disproportionately poor? And what, if anything, could international law do about it? 

Her doctoral research, which became her first book, focused on the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). It is, she explains, the leading international legal instrument on women’s rights, ratified by 189 countries. And it says almost nothing about poverty. “There’s no kind of obligation on states to tackle the gender dimensions of women’s economic deprivation”, she explains: “And so, obviously, that’s a massive source of rights violations. If you are a woman who is poor, it’s almost inherent that your rights are going to be violated.” 

The examples she reaches for tend to be both simple and quietly devastating. In the UK, before 1946, when a couple received social welfare benefits, the payment went directly into the man’s bank account. If the relationship was abusive or simply unequal, the woman might never see that money. “The way the law is structured, the delivery of benefits perpetuates women’s economic dependence on men. Those are the state’s structures that are keeping women poor.”  

Take the care economy. Most unpaid care of children, of the elderly, of whoever needs looking after at home, is still performed by women. That work takes time and energy. It limits the hours available for paid employment, the ability to develop skills, and the capacity to take economic opportunities as they arise. And almost every benefit system in the world, she argues, is built around a model that simply does not see this. “What it recognises as work tends to ignore the things that women do as actual work every day. That’s incredibly demanding of their time and energy.” She explains that women are told that they have to find work in the formal market, but when they explain they are burnt out from all the unpaid care work at home, caring for children, parents, in-laws, they are told “that is not work”. 

CEDAW, she concludes, does important work. It is progressive, wide-ranging, it even addresses climate change, noting that when disaster decimates public services, it is women who absorb the unpaid care work the state can no longer provide. But Campbell believes that it could be bolder. She says it needs to tell governments: “Your benefit levels are just too low. This is not enough money.”  

Through our conversation, the current political climate lurks constantly in the back of our minds. Trump’s second term. Farage in ascendance. ‘Gender-critical’ campaigns spreading across Western Europe and North America. Campbell does not minimise any of this. But she also does not panic, which is either a sign of deep faith in the long game or of habitual sangfroid, or possibly both. 

The systems, she acknowledges, are struggling. International institutions were built on the assumption that all states were operating in good faith, committed to a shared cosmopolitan ethos. “If you have actors who are now hostile to those systems”, she says, “it becomes very challenging, because the remedial tools these organisations have are often quite soft.” The UN can express concern. The Council of Europe can make recommendations. Neither can compel. 

Yet, if right-wing groups are working actively to defund and delegitimise these bodies, she points out, it must mean they perceive some threat in them. “If they were completely irrelevant, you would just ignore them. Law is not a perfect answer. It’s not the total solution. Looking to the law to solve all the problems of inequality will make people frustrated. But it’s a very powerful tool.” 

The work being done by the manosphere, the ecosystem of online figures and movements trading in hyper-traditional gender norms, is, she agrees, its own kind of threat. She has been researching comprehensive sexuality education, which is one of the arenas where this reaction is most visible: campaigns to roll back curricula that teach gender diversity, that tell girls their sexual pleasure matters, that dismantle the idea that men and women are fixed and opposite types.

“These norms that men in the manosphere are articulating might not seem connected to your day-to-day life”, she says, “but they create an enabling environment that legitimises retrogressive and conservative policies. These larger cultural norms are filtering into all different parts of our lives, and they will start to be reflected back in laws and policies”. She is not, she is careful to add, suggesting that engagement is the answer. Quite the opposite. “Not everyone is going to be rewriting constitutions. But you have the power to not engage, to stand up to these things when you see them happen in everyday life. And that’s all part of a larger project.” 

Campbell quotes something Carol Sanger, a scholar of American abortion law, said on the podcast RightsUp, which Campbell hosts for the Oxford Human Rights Hub. The point of anti-abortion laws, Sanger told her – the waiting periods, the parental consent requirements, and the mandated heartbeat screenings –  “is to make you feel ashamed that you got pregnant”. Campbell pauses: “That line just made me really rethink: if we had shame-free abortion laws, it would give so much autonomy and decision-making to women.” Then, more quietly: “But for most people, they don’t live under that kind of law.”  

This is what the Oxford Human Rights Hub exists to do. It takes the gap between what the law says and what it actually does to people’s lives and holds it up to the light. Blogs, podcasts, journal articles, documentary films: all freely available, all rigorous. “Universities are not well funded, and access to journal subscriptions is so expensive. We can create free resources for people who can’t afford access to them. But at the highest quality. Asking the hardest questions.” The Hub’s podcast was built on a specific frustration: that headlines about landmark cases tell you what happened and nothing about what it means. “People love podcasts, and they have time for podcasts,” she says. “Academia has sometimes snobbery around which mediums are the right mediums, where real scholarship lives. I don’t want to get bound up in those debates. Real scholarship is not just one format.”  

But asking the hardest questions means sitting with hard answers. Working in human rights, particularly on women’s poverty, is taxing. After a hard day, Campbell does the things anyone does: spends time with friends, gardening, wine bars, working out. She gets angry. She talks it through. She tries to figure out how to make things better. “You recognise it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Women have been fighting for their equality for a really long time. You’re part of that chain, like a baton race. It’s not your job to solve it completely. But it’s your job to keep trying to push the baton forward.” She says it without grandiosity. The way you might, if you had spent 20 years actually doing the running.