In its annual symposium, the institute addresses the most pressing contemporary human rights concerns of our times – from race and migration to the environment and technology, matters which resonate with our location here in Los Angeles, and which are reshaping our world.
Promise Institute Annual Symposium
Symposia
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2021 SYMPOSIUM - INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS AND CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY: CURRENT AND FUTURE CHALLENGES
On February 26, 2021, UCLA Law's Promise Institute for Human Rights, the Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs, and the Corporate Accountability Lab hosted a symposium to address issues of corporate accountability, featuring leading lawyers, scholars and activists and a keynote from Michael Fakhri, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
The second day of the symposium on February 27, 2021, was co-sponsored by UCLA Law's Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs and the International and Comparative Law Program, and will discuss future legal challenges in digital privacy and data collection, the creation of space law and policy, and sanctions and human rights enforcement.
UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. Each panel is approved for 1.25 hours of general MCLE credit. An individual can receive a maximum of 3.75 hours of general MCLE credit.
Day 1: Current Challenges - Co-sponsored by the Promise Institute for Human Rights, Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs, and Corporate Accountability Lab
Opening Remarks from the Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs, Promise Institute for Human Rights and Corporate Accountability Lab, and keynote address by Michael Fakhri, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, with Aslı Ü. Bâli, UCLA School of Law as moderator - Video
Panel: Human Trafficking in the International Food Supply Chain - Video
This panel addressed the current legal environment around forced labor, trafficking, and slavery in the food supply chain. Food sectors including chocolate and seafood have been found to have endemic problems with slavery and trafficking. This panel addressed the current legal landscape and proposed technological and practical solutions to hold wealthy corporations accountable for what is happening in their supply chain.
This panel is approved for 1.25 hours of general MCLE credit.
Download the papers for this panel.
Panelists
- Beth Van Schaack, Stanford Law School
- Paul Hoffman, UCI Law School, Schonbrun Seplow Harris Hoffman & Zeldes LLP
- Jesus M. Pizarro Rodriguez, Heifer International
- Kishanthi Parella, Washington and Lee University
Moderator
- Michael Roberts, UCLA School of Law
Concurrent Panels: Current Challenges
- Corporate Liability for International and Transnational Crimes - Video
Corporations sometimes facilitate crimes across country borders. This panel examined recent and ongoing cases regarding criminal activity that is aided and abetted from abroad by corporations. In particular, the panel discussed recent transmissions to the ICC regarding war crimes; aiding and abetting jurisprudence in various legal systems around the world; the transnational laws around human trafficking; and holding corporations accountable civilly for funding paramilitary groups.
This panel is approved for 1.25 hours of general MCLE credit.
Download the papers for this panel.
Panelists
-- Agnieszka Fryszman, Cohen Milstein
-- Miriam Saage-Maaß, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR)
-- Monalisa, International Human Rights Lawyer
-- Marissa Vahlsing, EarthRights International
Moderator
-- Cathy Sweetser, Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law
- The Corporation as Global Superpower - Video
Corporate Capture, Corporate Influence, and International Human Rights Law: Multinational corporations have continued to assert increasing influence on states and their decision making. How does the influence of corporations on state power affect the creation and enforcement of human rights law? How can countries hold corporations accountable when the corporations are larger than the countries by an order of magnitude?
This panel is approved for 1.25 hours of general MCLE credit.
Download the papers for this panel.
Panelists
-- Anita Ramasastry, University of Washington School of Law, United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights
-- Surya Deva, City University of Hong Kong
-- Dominic Renfrey, Center for Constitutional Rights
Moderator
-- Charity Ryerson, Corporate Accountability Lab
Day 2: Future Challenges - Co-sponsored by the Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs and the UCLA International and Comparative Law Program
Paper Workshops
Paper Workshop: AI, Data Privacy, & Future Technologies - Video
Participants
- Misha Nayak-Oliver, Just Fair UK -
- Corporate Activity Compounding Intersectional Inequities: Rethinking AI Regulation to Protect ESCR in the UK
- Dorothy Vinsky, LLM Candidate at UCLA School of Law
- Lessons from Standard Oil for Facebook and Google
- Scott Shackelford,Isak Nti Asare, Rachel Dockery, Angie Raymond, andAlexandra Sergueeva, Indiana University
- Should We Trust a Black Box to Safeguard Human Rights? A Comparative Analysis of AI Governance
Moderator
- Alex Alben, UCLA School of Law
Paper Workshop: The Corporation as a Global Superpower - Video
Participants
- Alveena Shah, Dechert LLP
- Leasing the Rain: Water, Privatization, and Human Rights
- Timothy Webster, Western New England University School of Law
- South Korea Shatters the Paradigm: Corporate Liability, Historical Accountability, and the Second World War
- Mara González Souto, JD Candidate at UCLA School of Law
- Through the ATS Door, Now What?: The Prevalence of MNC Misconduct, Disguise & Manipulation
Moderator
- Alex Wang, UCLA School of Law
Paper Workshop: Sanctions and Human Rights Enforcement - Video
Participants
- Marina Aksenova, IE Law School
- Three Potential Problems of Establishing Corporate Facilitation under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
- Jernej Letnar Černič, European School of Law, New University
- Enforcement Mechanisms Under the Potential United Nations Business and Human Rights Treaty: An Exploration
Moderator
- Richard Steinberg, UCLA School of Law
Concurrent Panels: Future Challenges
- AI, Surveillance, and Digital Privacy - Video
The growing concerns regarding corporate social responsibility surrounding digital privacy, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and the monetization of personal information has begun to gain ground in the legal field. What are the legal and political limits on how corporations govern themselves and the data they have collected? How realistically can international law prevent and mitigate human rights violations due to new and future technologies?
This panel is approved for 1.25 hours of general MCLE credit.
Readings
-- Maya Wang, 'The Robots are Watching Us,'
-- What is the GDPR, the EU's new data protection law?
-- Amba Kak, ed., "Regulating Biometrics: Global Approaches and Urgent Questions" AI Now Institute, September 1 2020
Panelists
-- April Falcon Doss, Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP
-- Amba Kak, AI Now Institute at NYU
-- Maya Wang, Human Rights Watch
-- Wojciech Wiewiórowski, European Data Protection Supervisor
Moderator
-- Byron Tau, Wall Street Journal
- Space: Humankind's Last, Best Hope for Peace? - Video
The space race between West and East in the middle of the twentieth century resulted in a number of technological developments and captivated the imagination of a generation. Now, in the twenty-first century, the space race has become increasingly privatized, and private companies—rather than the government—have begun to propose their own agendas for humanity's future in space. Elon Musk wants SpaceX to take private citizens to Mars. NASA wants to partially privatize the International Space Station. Jeff Bezos founded corporation Blue Origin, which envisions "millions of people living and working in space." As these private firms expand their activities in space and new enterprises enter the market, what legal frameworks should guide and constrain their behavior? How can international law, including existing international human rights law, hold corporate actors accountable in space?
This panel is approved for 1.25 hours of general MCLE credit.
Readings
-- Steven Freeland, (2020), 'The limits of law : challenges to the global governance of space activities', Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol 153, no 1 , pp 89 - 101
-- Center for Strategic and International Studies, Space Threat Assessment 2020
Panelists
-- Steven Freeland, University of Western Sydney
-- Mahulena Hofmann, University of Luxembourg
-- Makena Young, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Moderator
-- Rachel Crane, CNN
- Sanctions and Human Rights Enforcement - Video
Multilateral and unilateral sanctions are a frequent tool of states to halt access to the international financial system of human rights violators. Corporations play a role in both the perpetration and penalization of international human rights violations. How effective are sanctions as an accountability mechanism, and what is the role of financial institutions? Have sanctions for human rights abuses as part of international or bilateral trade agreements been effective tools for enforcement? What potential do international human rights mechanisms offer, and how can this best be realized?
This panel is approved for 1.25 hours of general MCLE credit.
Readings
-- George A. Lopez, 'Enforcing Human Rights through Economic Sanctions,' in Dina Shelton (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law, 2013
-- Maarten Smeets, 'Can economic sanctions be effective?', WTO Staff Working Paper, No. ERSD-2018-03
Panelists
-- John Prendergast, The Sentry
-- Anasuya Syam, Human Trafficking Legal Center
-- Scott Johnston, Human Rights First
-- Luis Moreno Ocampo, Getnick & Getnick LLP, former first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court
Moderator
-- Richard Steinberg, UCLA School of Law
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2020 Symposium - Human Rights and the Climate Crisis
The Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 2020 Symposium issue (Volume 25, Issue 1) is available to read without a paywall. A physical copy may also be purchased and the issue is also available through HeinOnline.New lawsuits and recent rulings are connecting human rights to the climate crisis in increasingly urgent ways. The Urgenda ruling in the Netherlands, the complaint filed by Greta Thunberg and others under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Philippines' Commission on Human Rights' finding against fossil-fuel companies exemplify recent cases that have captured the attention of the public, advocates, and legal scholars.
On February 28, 2020, UCLA's Promise Institute for Human Rights, Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs hosted a symposium at UCLA School of Law on Human Rights and the Climate Crisis. At the daylong event, leading lawyers, scholars, and activists examined the potential of rights-based arguments to halt and seek remedy for environmental harms, with a focus on climate change.
Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace and Amnesty International, and Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, General Coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, delivered keynote speeches.
Program
Welcome and Opening Keynote - Video
- Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace and Amnesty International
Panel One: Domestic Rights-Based litigation and Climate Change - Video
The last few years have seen a proliferation of imaginative legal strategies at the domestic level that have mobilized rights-based arguments to protect the environment and address climate change. Founding themselves on the human rights to life, health and privacy, as well as constitutional protections – in some cases of natural phenomena – and innovative intergenerational claims, these strategies have had unexpected success in some quarters. What principles are emerging from these various domestic cases, can they be translated across borders, and which offer the best potential to protect our environment and avert the climate crisis?
- Ann Carlson, Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law, UCLA School of Law
- Philip Gregory, Co-Lead Counsel in Juliana v. United States
- César Rodríguez-Garavito, Visiting Professor of Clinical Law, New York University School of Law
- Marco Simons, General Counsel, EarthRights International
Moderator: Cara Horowitz, Co-Executive Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, UCLA School of Law
Panel Two: International Human Rights Mechanisms and Climate Change - Video
International human rights mechanisms are paying increasing attention to climate change and the environment. The UN Human Rights Council resolutions on human rights and climate change since 2008 and the creation of the position of UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment in 2012 are symptomatic of this at the global level; regional human rights bodies, notably in Europe and the Americas, have issued important recent judgments and recommendations in this area. What potential do international human rights mechanisms offer to prevent and mitigate climate change, and how can this best be realized?
- Soledad García Muñoz, Special Rapporteur on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)
- James Hopkins, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, James E. Rogers College of Law, Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program
- Erika Lennon, Senior Attorney, Climate & Energy Program, Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL)
Moderator: Tendayi Achiume, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law, UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance
Lunchtime Concurrent Workshops
Concurrent Workshop Panel 1-A: Domestic Rights-Based Litigation and Climate Change
Discussant: Daniel Jacobs, Clinical Associate Professor of Management, Loyola Marymount University
- Luisa Gómez, Constitutional Lawyer, Colombia, Environmental protection of the Amazon in post-conflict setting: an opportunity for peace in the era of climate change
- Natalie McCauley, Law Fellow, Public International Law and Policy Group, Water Rights and Day Zero: Perspectives on the Cape Town Water Crisis
- Melodie Meyer, JD Candidate, UCLA School of Law, Paguate-Jackpile Mine: Uranium Mining, Climate Crisis, and American Eco-Nationalism
Concurrent Workshop Panel 1-B: Domestic Rights-Based litigation and Climate Change
Discussant: Sean Hecht, Co-Executive Director, Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Evan Frankel Professor of Policy and Practice and Co-Director, Environmental Law Clinic, UCLA School of Law
- Paolo Farah, Assistant Professor of Public Administration, West Virginia University, Urgenda vs. Juliana: Lessons for Future Climate Change Litigation Cases
- Elizabeth Wilson, Visiting Scholar, Rutgers Law School–Newark, Is there a Constitutional Right to a Climate Capable of Sustaining Human Life? The Youth Climate Movement and the Problem of Natural Rights
Concurrent Workshop Panel 2: International Human Rights Mechanisms and Climate Change
Discussant: Catherine Sweetser, Deputy Director, Promise Institute for Human Rights and Director, International Human Rights Clinic, UCLA School of Law
- Cinnamon Carlarne, Alumni Society Designated Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, Climate Change, Human Rights, & The Rule of Law: Untangling the Rights-Rule of Law Relationship in the Climate Change Context
- Fabrizio Vona, PhD Candidate, Sapienza University of Rome, Identifying Achilles' Heels: An Assessment of the Effectiveness of Human Rights Law in Climate Change Litigation
Concurrent Workshop Panel 3: International Criminal Law and Climate Change
Discussant: Máximo Langer, Professor of Law, Director of the UCLA Transnational Program on Criminal Justice and Faculty Director of the UCLA Criminal Justice Program, UCLA School of Law
- Erika McDonald, JD Candidate, University of Houston Law Center, Truth, Dignity, and the Power of Global Witness: A Criminal Law Approach to Resisting the Normalization of Climate Change Denial
- A. Camilo Ramírez Gutiérrez, Law Clerk, Revision Section of the JEP; Professor of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Universidad del Bosque and Alvaro Sebastian Saavedra Eslava, Lawyer at Colombian Commission of Jurist, Protection of the Natural environment under IHL and ICL: The case of the JEP [Special Jurisdiction for Peace] in Colombia
Poetry Reading - Video
Karen McCarthy Woolf, Fulbright All Disciplines Scholar and Promise Institute Poet-in-Residence
Panel Three: International Criminal Law and Climate Change - Video
Faced with the climate crisis, the movement to create a new international crime of environmental destruction is gaining voice. What would such a crime look like? Is it necessary, or can existing international criminal law be mobilized, for example by classifying massive environmental damage as a crime against humanity? What are the legal and political obstacles to either approach? What opportunities do they offer and how realistic is it to look to international criminal law to prevent and mitigate climate change?
- Jelena Aparac, Lecturer and Consultant, member of the UN Working Group on the use of mercenaries
- Nema Milaninia, former Trial Attorney, Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Court
- Richard Rogers, Founding Partner, Global Diligence LLP
Moderator: Kate Mackintosh, Executive Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA School of Law
Closing Keynote - Video
- Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, General Coordinator, Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, environmental and human rights activist
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2019 Symposium - Critical Perspectives on Race and Human Rights: Transnational Re-Imaginings
March 8, 2019
Welcome and Introduction - Video
Panel One: Race, Political Equality and Human Rights - Video
The international human rights regime often falls short of its universal ambitions, and does so in racially discriminatory or racially unequal ways. This panel will apply TWAIL and CRT to illuminate the racialized implications of the history, evolutions, structure, and priorities of the international human rights regime, including the primacy accorded individual “civil and political rights”. Panelists will also consider political equality among peoples or sovereigns, by exploring how race, sovereignty and human rights interface. Drawing on TWAIL and CRT perspectives will enrich the panel’s engagements with the many meanings and valences of political equality among individuals and among sovereigns in a postcolonial age that remains marked by empire.
Moderator: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
- Aziz Rana, Professor of Law at Cornell Law School
- John Reynolds, Lecturer and Programme Director of LL.M. in International Justice at Maynooth University
- Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Associate Professor of Law and Development at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; head of the International Development Group; founding Director of the Program on Human Rights and Justice; and founder of the Displacement Research and Action Network (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- Laura Gómez, Professor of Law & Faculty Director of Critical Race Studies Program, UCLA School of Law, Professor by Courtesy, UCLA Departments of Sociology and Chicana & Chicano Studies
First Concurrent Session
Concurrent Panel 1: Migration - Room 1347
Discussant: Hiroshi Motomura, Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
- Amanda Brown, Class of 2020, UCLA School of Law, Racism at the Gate to Refuge: A Critique of the Special Immigration Visa Program
- Blanche Cook, Assistant Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School, Johnny Appleseed: Citizenship Transmission Laws and a White Heteropatriarchal Property Right in Philandering, Sexual Exploitation, and Rape (The "Whip")
- Susan Reardon-Smith, Academic Support Officer Refugee Law Initiative, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Linking Land and Sea: Intersections between Indigenous peoples' dispossession and asylum seekers' containment by Australia
Concurrent Panel 2: Migration - Room 1357
Discussant: Cecilia Menjivar, Dorothy L. Meier Chair and Professor of Sociology at UCLA
- Jay Johnson, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at UCLA, State Borders, Urban Boundaries, and Legal Identities: The Case of Refugee Reception Offices in South African Cities
- Eleni Karageorgiou, Lecturer in Law at Lund University, Sweden, Making sense of EU cooperation with third countries as a response to the 2015/2016 'refugee crisis': an intervention project legitimized by a quest to solidarity?
- Janine Silga, Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg, The Ambiguity of the Migration and Development Nexus Policy Discourse: Perpetuating the Colonial Legacy?
- Thomas Spijkerboer, Professor of Migration Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Global Mobility Infrastructure: Reconceptualising the Externalisation of Migration Control
Concurrent Panel 3: Political Equality - Room 1420
Discussant: Kamari Clarke, Visiting Professor in Anthropology at UCLA, and Professor of Global and International Studies and Anthropology at Carleton University
- Catherine Powell, Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law, Race, Gender, and Nation in an Age of Shifting Borders
- Yuvraj Joshi, Doctoral candidate at the Yale Law School, Affirmative Action as Transitional Justice
- Mack Eason, PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at UCLA, Legacies of Empire in International Law: Discourses of International Crime and Criminality in the Long 19th Century
- Gil Gott, Associate Professor at DePaul University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Human Rights, Neoliberalism and Race
Keynote
- HRH Prince Zeid Raad Al-Hussein, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
- Introduced by: Aslı Ü. Bâli, Faculty Director, the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law
Panel Two: Race, Migration, Human Rights - Video
Today, migrants and refugees confront hostility across the world, at risk from explicit political projects of racialized or religious exclusion, and from institutional and governance regimes that have this very same effect. As nation-states, especially in the global north, consolidate regimes of migrant and refugee exclusion and control, the human rights frame stands as the ascendant counter to sovereignty discourse at the global and regional levels. Panelists will explore the human rights frame as both “problem” and “solution,” and consider the circumstances of refugees, involuntary displaced persons (including as a result of climatic conditions), and those who move on account of economic conditions.
Moderator: Tendayi Achiume, Assistant Professor, UCLA School of Law
- Jennifer Chacón, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law
- Chantal Thomas, Professor of Law at Cornell Law School
- Maxine Burkett, Professor of Law at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Second Concurrent Session
Concurrent Panel 4: Political Equality - Room 1347
Discussant: Angela Riley, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Director of UCLA's Native Nations Law and Policy Center
- Kristen Carpenter, Council Tree Professor of Law and Director of the American Indian Law Program at the University of Colorado Law School & Alexey Tsykarev, Chair of the Center for Support of Indigenous Peoples and Civic Diplomacy "Young Karelia" ("Nuori Karjala"), (Indigenous) Language as a Human Right
- Sujith Xavier, Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor, The Human Rights Complex: A Site of Emancipation for People of Colour & Indigenous Peoples?
- Danielle Boaz, Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies Department (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Witnessing Terrorism: Religious Racism and Access to Justice in Brazil
- Ntina Tzouvala, Postdoctoral Fellow with the Laureate Program in International Law at the University of Melbourne Law School, The 'logic of biology' and the international legal argument: the standard of civilisation and its enduring relevance
Concurrent Panel 5: Socio-Economic Inequality - Room 1357
Discussant: Noah Zatz, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
- Anthony Farley, James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law School, Banners of Colonial Occupation: Marxism, Development Theory, International Law, and Critical Race Theory
- Kai Fees, Research affiliate at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, visiting scholar, and project supervisor of the International Human Rights Clinic at the UCLA School of Law, Narrowing Neutrality… Now What? Preliminary thoughts on the UN human rights system’s recent critiques of neoliberal economic policies (Working Title)
- Zinaida Miller, Assistant Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Law & Policy, Harvard Law School, Rupture and Reckoning: The Times, Victims, and Experts of Transitional Justice
- Catherine Imbeck, Legal Consultant for the United Nations, Re-conceptualizing decolonization in international law
Concurrent Panel 6: Socio-Economic Inequality - Room 1430
Discussant: Peter Hudson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at UCLA
- Jay Butler, Assistant Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School, The Corporate Keepers of International Law
- Ernesto Hernández-Lopez, Professor of Law at Chapman University Fowler School of Law, México’s GMO corn fight: Race’s Role in Sovereignty, Biodiversity, and Regulation
- Chaumtoli Huq, Associate Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law and Founder/Editor of Law@theMargins, Charting Global Economic Inequalities in the Garment and Tea Worker Struggles of Bangladesh
- Andrea Freeman, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law, A Comparative Study of Food Inequality under Capitalist and Socialist Political and Economic Systems
Concurrent Panel 7: Roundtable on Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality - Room 1420
- H. Samy Alim, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language, University of California, Los Angeles
- Lee Cabatingan, Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology, Law & Society, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
- Kamari Clarke, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
- Laura Gómez, Professor of Law & Faculty Director of Critical Race Studies Program, UCLA School of Law, Professor by Courtesy, UCLA Departments of Sociology and Chicana & Chicano Studies
- Howard Winant, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
Panel Three: Race, Socio-Economic Inequality, and Human Rights - Video
This panel seeks to interrogate legal protections for economic, social and cultural rights in the seven decades since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from a perspective that centers racial equality, and the rights of the Third and Fourth Worlds. Recent scholarship has asserted that human rights frameworks developed in ways that complement neoliberalism rather than attenuating the gaping inequalities it has produced. Using CRT and TWAIL approaches, panelists will query whether and to what extent the individual conception of rights at the heart of the human rights framework has been implicated in the promotion of free markets at the expense of social welfare.
Moderator: Hannah Appel, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
- Adelle Blackett, Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law and Development at the Faculty of Law, McGill University
- Vidya Kumar, Associate Professor at the University of Leicester, Law School
- Radhika Balakrishnan, Faculty director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership, and Professor, Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University
- Matiangai Sirleaf, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh Law School