Michael Fakhri

Associate Professor of Law at the University of Oregon School of Law, and UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food since May 2020. Legal scholar of international law and food systems, with earlier work on Fair Trade, sugar politics, and international commodity regimes.

His 2024 report to the General Assembly, A/79/171, Starvation and the right to food, with an emphasis on the Palestinian people’s food sovereignty, is one of the most direct recent legal articulations of the right to food as a right that governments can violate by omission and by policy design, in engineered food deprivation as much as in acute famine.

Why he matters here

Fakhri’s argument converges with the Voluntary Famines critique developed on this resource: starvation is not only what happens to people who have nothing, it is also what happens when a nutritional order is arranged in a way that makes physiological adequacy impossible. His legal framing gives the biomedical argument its human rights doctrinal counterpart.