Dr Jayson Lamchek

Jayson is an interdisciplinary human rights scholar studying rights in their legal, political, international and historical contexts. He is a Research Fellow at Deakin Law School and the Cyber Security Collaborative Research Center. Jayson's current research lies in the intersection of human rights and new technology. At CSCRC, he is looking at legal and ethical aspects of cybersecurity research and technology development, and cyber-mediated social change.

Jayson's human rights scholarship has engaged various challenges in counterterrorism, irregular migration, and the War on Drugs. Jayson's monograph Human Rights-Compliant Counterterrorism: Myth-making and Reality in the Philippines and Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2019) critically assesses the intersection of human rights law with counterterrorism. It contributes case studies of state violence, social movement activism and law reform in the Philippines and Indonesia to examine the impact of the language of international human rights on counterterrorism practice on the ground. His articles appear in the Australian Journal of Human Rights, Asian Studies Review and International Criminal Law Review. He contributed chapters to Criminal Legalities in the Global South (Routledge, 2020) and Duterte Reader (Cornell University Press, 2017).

As an international lawyer, Jayson examines Third World movement-inspired international law principles with radical redistributive intent, particularly the right to benefit from scientific progress. He is investigating potential benefit-sharing in Big Data, and in relating the same to developments in medicine, food production, and mining in the deep sea and outer space. A preview of his work on this topic appears in “The right to benefit from Big Data progress: another argument for Universal Basic Income,” June 2020, Voelkerrechtsblog.org, https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/the-right-to-benefit-from-big-data-progress/.

Jayson has a background as a practitioner, having been a lawyer and advocate for non-government organizations in the Philippines, including the Public Interest Law Center (PILC) and Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center (LRC), for more than seven years. He was Senior Lecturer at the University of the Philippines-Manila. Jayson was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore from 2017-2019 and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) College of Law from 2019-2021. He completed his PhD at the ANU as an Endeavour scholar. He was also a recipient of the Erasmus Mundus scholarship (European Commission) and the Monbukagakusho scholarship (Japan).