Su Yin Htun
Visiting Scholar
Su Yin Htun is an Institute of International Education Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) fellow and visiting scholar in the Einaudi Center for International Studies’ Southeast Asia Program.
Htun's specialization is in human rights law, and she teaches constitutional law and human rights law. Her research focuses on the human rights of vulnerable individuals in political, criminal, and migration contexts from a legal perspective. She offers intellectual support to victims of human rights violations through research publications, policy recommendations to the government, pro bono legal services to marginalized individuals, and advocacy training for youth. She has multiple international publications based on her research, in which citizenship and stateless issues were the most prominent themes.
Htun fled from Burma to the United States in 2024 with refugee status because she was wanted by the military junta due to voluntarily taking part in the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM). She is still working at the International Affairs Department of the Ministry of Education under the National Unity Government, Myanmar. Moreover, she keeps promoting human rights education for university students and youth in Myanmar in both formal and informal educational settings.
Prior to coming to Cornell, Htun was a research associate at the College of Law affiliated with the School of Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She was also an adjunct instructor with the Human Rights Practice Program and formerly a Professor of Law at the University of Mandalay in Myanmar.
Htun has been a Fulbright scholar in the US-ASEAN program. She was awarded as an exile scholar by the Reconceptualizing Exile Programme from the Global Campus Human Rights, which is a network of 100 universities worldwide, the largest globally, that focuses on human rights education in higher education. She is one of the initiators of human rights education at formal degree programs in the universities in Myanmar.
Htun has organized numerous training programs for human rights law teaching, collaborating with institutions such as Columbia University in the USA, Australian National University in Australia, Raoul Wallenberg Institute (RWI) in Sweden, Denmark Institute of Human Rights in Denmark, and Chaing Mai University and Mahidol University, both in Thailand. Past affiliations include serving as a research fellow at RWI in Sweden, the Central European University in Hungary, and the Asian Law Institute at the National University of Singapore.