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International human rights law is the body of treaties and standards that binds states in how they treat people, and a human rights lawyer knows both what those rules require and how to hold a state to account. IHR Advisors was founded by Ben Keith and Rhys Davies, lawyers who act for individuals, governments and NGOs in the gravest of these matters across borders. Most of this work begins where a national court has already failed, or was never going to help.
International human rights law mechanisms are engaged when domestic courts and systems fail. Arbitrary detention, where a person is held with no lawful basis or no fair means to challenge the detention. Torture and mistreatment in custody. Politically motivated prosecution, where a criminal charge is a cover for punishing what someone believes, says, or represents. The abuse of state power against critics, journalists, opposition figures and their families, often reaching them long after they have left the country.
What these cases share is that the harm comes from the state itself, and the ordinary route, a fair hearing in the country where it happened, is closed. The person is left facing the machinery of a government with the courts, the police and the prosecutors on one side. International human rights law exists for exactly that imbalance. It opens a forum above the national one, where the state can be made to answer for what it has done.
International human rights law is enforced through a set of forums and courts that sit outside any single country. The main ones are the United Nations human rights mechanisms and the regional human rights courts and commissions.
Within the UN system, treaty bodies are the committees that supervise the human rights conventions states have signed, and they can receive complaints from individuals whose rights have been breached. Special procedures are the independent experts, the Special Rapporteurs and working groups appointed to examine particular abuses, who can take up a case, press a government for answers and report publicly on what they find. The ones that bear most on this practice are the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. A finding from one of these bodies carries real weight, with governments, with courts in other countries, and in the court of opinion, even where it cannot be enforced like a domestic judgment.
The regional courts and commissions do similar work for the states within their reach, and a case is often run across more than one forum at once. Choosing the right forum, and the right order, is part of the work. A submission that lands in the wrong place, or arrives before the domestic routes have been properly exhausted, can be turned away on procedure before the substance is ever heard.
International human rights work is not the same as litigation in a national court, and a lawyer who is strong in one is not automatically strong in the other. These cases turn on bodies of law and procedure that most practitioners never touch: the admissibility rules of the UN committees, the mandates of the special procedures, the standards a regional court will apply, and the question of how proceedings in one forum affect those in another.
They rarely run alone. A single case can involve a UN submission, an extradition fight, an asylum claim and a press strategy, all live at the same time and all pulling on each other. Running them together, so that a step taken in one does not damage another, is the part that takes experience. It is also where most of the difference is made.
Ben Keith has spent years acting in cases where a state has turned its own power against the people it should protect, taking those cases to the bodies built to hold governments to account and acting in extradition and asylum proceedings where the charge underneath comes from a state with little regard for the rule of law. He is a lawyer at 5SAH in London, ranked for extradition and international work in both Chambers and Partners and the Legal 500, the former describing him as “out of this world”.
In 2021 he co-wrote Undue Influence: The UAE and INTERPOL with Rhys Davies and Sir David Calvert-Smith, setting out how political interference reached an international institution’s own leadership, and the report fed directly into the case for reform. He has appeared on CBS 60 Minutes, written for the Financial Times, given evidence to the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, and co-founded Red Notice Monitor, where he edits and publishes legal analysis of INTERPOL cases and policy.
Rhys Davies has built the same kind of practice from a different chair: cases involving torture, extradition and politically motivated prosecution across several jurisdictions, and communications to the United Nations where a case calls for them. He is a lawyer at Temple Garden Chambers in London and The Hague, ranked as a leading individual by the Legal 500 2026, which calls him “a standout international lawyer” and the lawyer others turn to for UN submissions in difficult cases.
He has written on international law for The Economist, Newsweek, City A.M., the Guardian, The Times and the Independent, appears regularly on Al Jazeera, and has featured on CBS 60 Minutes and the Sky News Dirty Work podcast. He co-founded and edits Red Notice Monitor, and in 2025 he gave evidence, alongside Ben Keith, to the Joint Committee on Human Rights.
Ben Keith and Rhys Davies founded IHR Advisors to keep the legal work, the strategy and the press handling of these cases in one place, because in practice they cannot be pulled apart. A serious human rights case is rarely won by a single filing, and the firm runs the whole of it: advising on the substance of international human rights law, choosing the forum and building the submission, carrying the extradition, asylum and related proceedings that move alongside it, handling publicity where it helps and holding it back where it would not, and working with local counsel in whatever country the matter touches.
The people the firm acts for are individuals and their families, NGOs, business people, politically exposed persons and human rights defenders, and it advises governments on their own obligations and disputes. The cases come most often from states with a settled habit of transnational repression, the reaching of a government beyond its own borders to silence the people who criticise it.
It is the body of treaties, customary rules and standards that govern how states must treat people, both their own citizens and others within their power. It sets limits on detention, prohibits torture, protects free expression and fair trial, and creates forums where a state can be called to account when it breaches those limits.
Individuals whose rights have been breached, and in many forums the family members or representatives acting for them, can bring a claim, as can NGOs in some procedures. The route available depends on which conventions the state has signed and which forum fits the facts. Specialist advice at the outset decides which door is open.
That is the point at which international human rights law becomes the remedy rather than a backup. Where the domestic courts are captured, ineffective or part of the problem, the case moves to the UN mechanisms or a regional court, which can examine the state’s conduct from outside its reach.
It varies with the forum and the facts, and serious cases often run for a year or more, with several strands live at once. A realistic timescale is something the firm sets out at the start rather than promising a quick result.
Contact IHR Advisors through the contact page on this site. Ben and Rhys take instructions from individuals, family members, organisations and legal teams working in parallel. Early advice matters, because the first decisions in a case often fix what is open to you later.
If you, or someone you act for, is facing the power of a state with no fair hearing in sight, take advice early rather than late. The forum, the timing and the order in which steps are taken all shape what can be achieved, and the choices made at the start are the hardest to undo. A human rights lawyer can usually tell you, inside a single conversation, where you stand and what can be done about it.
If you would like to speak with us about our areas of practice or anything else please contact us via the form linked below.
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