Hilary Charlesworth is a Professor in the Regulatory Institutions Network and Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice, ANU. She also holds an appointment as Professor of International Law and Human Rights in the Faculty of Law, ANU.

In 2005, she was awarded a Federation Fellowship by the Australian Research Council for a project on building democracy and justice after conflict. She has held visiting appointments at Washington & Lee School of Law, Harvard Law School, NYU Global Law School and as Wayne Morse Professor at the University of Oregon. She was also the 2005 Sir Ninian Stephen Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law at the Law Faculty, University of Melbourne. She was co-winner of the American Society of International Law's Goler T Butcher medal in 2006 for significant contributions to international human rights law.

She was the inaugural President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law and is Patron of the ACT Women's Legal Service. She has been Co-Editor of the Australian Yearbook of International Law since 1996 and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law since 1999.

She has worked with various non-governmental human rights organisations on ways to implement international human rights standards and was chair of the ACT Government's inquiry into an ACT bill of rights, which culminated in the adoption of the ACT Human Rights Act 2004.