Ten years of the Journal of Human Rights Practice

Richard Carver writes:

A happy and peaceful New Year to all the readers of this blog. We will be back in January with news of CENDEP’s new partnership with Arba Minch University in Ethiopia, as well as the build-up to the 18^th annual Oxford Human Rights Festival in March.

Meanwhile, while it is still (just) 2019, I wanted to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Journal of Human Rights Practice (OUP), a publication that has been closely associated with CENDEP since its launch.

The idea for a human rights journal that would focus not on law but on the activities that make rights a reality came from the founding editors, Brian Phillips and Paul Gready. Brian was the course leader for the Development and Emergency Practice Masters, founder of the Oxford Human Rights Festival, and my predecessor teaching human rights here. Paul, who directs the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, was the DEP external examiner at the time. I joined the editorial board in 2016 and became an editor two years ago, joining Paul and Ron Dudai, from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Brian continues his close association with the journal as reviews editor.

We recently published a tenth anniversary issue containing a series of reflections on the practice of human rights over the past decade. The issue is free online and it might be worth looking at, alongside the inevitable end-of-year and end-of-decade reviews that have been the lazy stock in trade of the newspapers over the past few weeks.


The journal remains closely linked to CENDEP’s mission of critical research and reflection on humanitarian practice, as well as providing a common forum for activists and academics. These words from our editors’ introduction might give a flavour:

In 2009, we set ourselves a number of tasks. The relationship between academia and human rights practice seemed to be shifting away from debates about the intellectual validity of human rights as a way of framing the world towards an exploration of implementation: do human rights make a difference in practice?... This focus on implementation also seemed to imply steps towards an interdisciplinary approach and away from the stranglehold of law and international relations. It implied a focus on relatively neglected issues, especially in the field of economic and social rights, and actors, such as persons with disabilities. Both practice and practitioners have been interpreted in a capacious and inclusive manner….

The global context in which the Journal was launched ten years ago has changed, but not unrecognizably. We were then still in the shadow of 9/11, with widespread assaults on civil liberties. In the intervening years there has been scant reckoning and accountability for those human rights violations, many of which persist. The conflicts of the 2000s have shifted in their location, but have been every bit as bloody in the past decade. The role of human rights practitioners in situations of armed conflict remains just as urgent. The persistence and expansion of conflict has led to increased (and arguably unprecedented) refugee flows, which have moved to the centre of human rights practice in many countries and have, we hope, been adequately reflected in this Journal. Framing all these issues is the impact of anthropogenic climate change, which we identified as a central question confronting human rights practitioners ten years ago. The urgency of reducing and mitigating global warming is ever more urgent today, although neither human rights practitioners nor the Journal itself have done all that they might have done.

While the populist surge of the past three or four years was not anticipated in 2009, the shrinking space for civic activism in many countries was an issue that we did anticipate and have sought to address. One of our first duties is to defend the right to human rights practice itself, which is under threat as it always has been.