As the 20th Oxford Human Rights Festival (OxHRF) kicks off on March 11th, MA DEP Post Graduate student, Victoria Greenwood reflects on the festival theme of ‘Movement’ through her experience in Calais.
“Extreme inequality in our world makes free movement safe and easy for those of us privileged to hold a British passport and be protected by double vaccines.” by Victoria Greenwood.
In the last of a series of three blogs on human rights, Richard Carver writes,
…[T]o be ‘for’ human rights means… to be willing to venture interpretations of those rights in the same place and with the same language employed by the dominant power, to dispute its hierarchy and methods, to elucidate what it has hidden, to pronounce what it has silenced or rendered unpronounceable. (Edward Said)
In my previous posts, I argued that human rights are only one possible lens for examining social and political issues and that they should not aspire to offer a universal panacea. In this post, I discuss the view that human rights practitioners can, or should, address the “root causes” of human rights issues.
Increasingly, people of good will concerned about poverty are drawn into debate about a series of ultimately impossible legal quandaries—right of whom, against whom, remediable how, and so on — and into institutional projects of codification and reporting familiar from other human rights efforts, without evaluating how these might compare with other uses for this talent and these resources. (David Kennedy)
I argued in my previous post that the besetting weakness of the human rights community is our apparent inability to understand that human rights constitute only one possible lens for viewing a particular problem. To illustrate this, consider an issue that seems to belong indubitably within the human rights sphere: the prohibition of torture. Yet human rights do not constitute the only approach to this issue. For example, the laws of armed conflict contain a clear and absolute prohibition on torture, along with mechanisms to punish its perpetrators. It is not unreasonable to assume that in certain circumstances, that might be a more appropriate way to address torture.
The conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke probably finds little favour with most readers of this blog. However, for the past 13 years I have been in the slightly unusual position of teaching human rights in an architecture school and, with a bit of tweaking, Burke’s words have resonated with me fairly often. What is the use of discussing a person’s abstract right to adequate housing? I shall always advise to call in the aid of the architect and the structural engineer – in plentiful supply among my colleagues – rather than the human rights lawyer (me).
This interview was first published in the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS) written by ALICE TROY-DONOVAN (6 January 2022)
https://www.diis.dk/en/node/25402
Migrants drowning in the English Channel and freezing to death at the Belarus-Poland border have captured public and media attention across Europe, but these events only tell part of the story of EU attempts to block migration to its member states, says researcher Zoe Jordan.
The impact of EU migration policy now stretches far beyond the Union’s actual territorial borders, with millions of euros invested in efforts to control and curb mobility from and between African and Middle Eastern countries – also known as border ‘externalisation’. Such initiatives are profoundly impacting the lives of migrants themselves as well as entire political and policy-making landscapes within the countries from which they move.
