Jean Allain

He is now also professor of law at Monash University Faculty of Law in Melbourne, Australia and associate of the university's Castan Center. He was also appointed visiting professor at the Beijing Pedagogical University from 2017 to 2020.

In 2016, a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights made extensive use of Allain's expertise on slavery and forced labor and the concept of modern slavery.

Allain is a generalist in the field of international law, specializing in human rights. His work focuses on modern slavery and human trafficking. The 2012 book The Legal Understanding of Slavery, From the Historical to the Contemporary, which he edited, is considered the most comprehensive account of the Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery regarding the concept of slavery and its interpretation in law. In 2008, the Australian Supreme Court established the legal applicability of the 1926 definition of slavery to contemporary situations on the basis of these guidelines.

He became professor of public international law and director of the Human Rights Center at Queen's University Belfast. From 1998 to 2004, he taught at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He subsequently became professor of public international law at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull, and associate professor at the Center for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Since 2015, he has been special advisor to Anti-Slavery International, the world's oldest human rights organization.

Jean Allain (born in Canada, 1965) is a legal scholar, author, professor at Monash University and from 2017-2021 had a concurrent position at the University of Hull; since 2008 has been extraordinary professor at the University of Pretoria, and from 2015-2019 special advisor to Anti-Slavery International. He is known for his pioneering work on modern slavery.