Transforming Human Rights in a Transformed World

Transforming Human Rights in a Transformed World

A Conversation between Prof Sandra Fredman (Oxford), Prof (Retd Justice) Susanne Baer (Federal Constitutional Court of Germany & Visiting Professor at LSE) and Justice Steven Majiedt Constitutional Court of South Africa, moderated by Prof Başak Çalı (Oxford)

An Event Marking Prof Sandra Fredman's Retirement

What does it mean to do human rights in a transformed world of global polycrisis? 

Taking inspiration from Sandra Fredman's field-defining work on human rights, including Human Rights Transformed, Comparative Human Rights Law, Women and the Law, and Discrimination Law, the conversation will explore what it means to do human rights at a time when human rights guarantees have proliferated as have the human rights violations. More fundamentally, the conditions for which human rights transformation was imagined - of liberal democracy - themselves have eroded. 

How can human rights respond to entrenched and emerging forms of inequality? What roles should scholars and judges play in giving them transformative force? And how might the work of human rights extend beyond universities and courts into our lives as people and as 'the public'?

The conversation will bring together perspectives from scholarship and constitutional adjudication across different jurisdictions.

The event celebrates Prof Sandra Fredman’s remarkable contribution to human rights law while taking her scholarship as an invitation to look forward: to ask how human rights might continue to be interpreted, practised and transformed.

This special event marks Prof Sandra Fredman’s retirement from the Professorship of the Laws of the British Commonwealth and the United States at the University of Oxford. 

Students, friends and colleagues are warmly invited to attend.

This is a public event.

Sandra Fredman is Professor of the Laws of the British Commonwealth and the USA at Oxford University, and a professorial fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005 and became a QC (honoris causa) in 2012.   She has written and published widely on anti-discrimination law, human rights law and labour law, including numerous peer-reviewed articles. She has authored four monographs: Comparative Human Rights (OUP, 2018);  Human Rights Transformed (OUP 2008); Discrimination Law (2nd ed, OUP 2011); and Women and the Law (OUP 1997), as well as two co-authored books: The State as Employer (Mansell, 1988), with Gillian Morris, and Labour Law and Industrial Relations in Great Britain (2nd ed Kluwer, 1992) with Bob Hepple. She has also edited several books: Human Rights and Equality in Education (Policy Press, 2018, with Meghan Campbell and Helen Taylor);  Discrimination and Human Rights: The Case of Racism (OUP, 2001); and Age as an Equality Issue (Hart, 2003 with Sarah Spencer). She was awarded a three year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2004 to further her research into socio-economic rights and substantive equality. She is South African and holds degrees from the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Oxford. She has acted as an expert adviser on equality law and labour legislation in the EU, Northern Ireland, the UK, India, South Africa, Canada, Malaysia and the UN; and is a barrister practising at Old Square Chambers. She founded the Oxford Human Rights Hub in 2012, of which she is the Director.

Susanne Baer is the Professor of Public Law and Gender Studies at Humboldt University Berlin and a Lea Bates Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She is also a Visiting Professor at LSE. From 2011 until 2023, she served as Justice of the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany. She also received honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan (2014), the University of Hasselt (2017) and the University of Lucerne (2018). In the UK, she is a Corresponding Fellow at the British Academy of Arts and Scienes, where she gave the Maccabean Lecture in 2019. She has taught at CEU Budapest, in Austria, Switzerland and, most recently, at University of Toronto, with former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella.

Currently at Humboldt, Susanne teaches the mandatory lecture course on law and sociology, an advanced course on interdisciplinary analyses of law-making, and a colloquium on classics of feminist jurisprudence. She also regularly teaches a course on comparative constitutionalism, focusing on inequalities and judging under pressure.

Susanne studied law and political science in Berlin and Michigan. She was active in movements against discrimination, including pornography, sexual harassment and domestic violence. At Humboldt University, she directed the GenderCompetenceCentre to advise the German government on gender mainstreaming 2003-2010. She has also served as Vice-President for International and Student Affairs, as Director of Gender Studies and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law. There, she initated the Law and Society Institute Berlin and the Humboldt Law Clinic of Fundamental and Human Rights. Currently, beyond serving on editorial boards, she is the director of the board of the Stiftung Forum Recht, a federal foundation of the German Bundestag to explain, defend, and reflect on rule of law.

Justice Steven Arnold Majiedt is a current Justice of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa. He was appointed in 2019, leaving his seat at the Supreme Court of Appeal, where he was first appointed in 2010. Prior to this, Justice Majiedt was an advocate at the Northern Cape Society of Advocates, before his first judicial appointment at the Northern Cape High Court in Kimberley in 2000.

Justice Majiedt’s practising career was characterised by significant political work, and his ethos is primarily centred on advocating for the voiceless. During Justice Majiedt’s time as a judge he has ruled on matters both complex and controversial – ranging from international criminal law to the interpretation of statutory licensing requirements.

Başak Çalı is professor of international law and head of research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. Previously, she was professor of international law and founding director of the  Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School, Berlin. She holds a permanent visiting professorship from the I-Courts Centre for Excellence at the University of Copenhagen and is a fellow the University of Essex Human Rights Centre and the Hertie School. She has held visiting professorships in Ankara, Oslo, Paris, and Natolin and serves on the board of a number of journals.

Her expertise concerns international law and human rights. She has published widely in the fields of authority of international law, standards of review in international law, the relationship between international law and domestic law, European human rights law, UN human rights law and comparative international human rights law. She has pioneered the study of bad faith violations of human rights law (Wisconsin International Law Journal, 2018), and is the author of 'Authority of International Law: Obedience, Respect and Rebuttal' (OUP 2015), editor of International Law for International Relations (OUP, 2010), co- editor of Legalisation of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law (Routledge 2006), Migration and the European Convention on Human Rights (OUP, 2021) and Secondary Rules of Primary Importance: Standards of Review, Causality, Evidence and Attribution before International Courts and Tribunals (OUP, 2022). Her forthcoming co-authored manuscript Leading Cases in UN Human Rights Law will be published by OUP in 2026.

She is the principle investigator of ‘Deep Impact through Soft Jurisprudence? The Contribution of United Nations Treaty Body Case Law to the Development of International Human Rights Law’ (German Science Council 2023-2026), and principle investigator of the 7-year German Science Council-funded cluster of excellence  ‘Transforming Human Rights’ based at the FAU Research Center for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg. She has been the principal investigator of research grants funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy, amongst others.

As a legal practitioner, Başak has acted as an expert on the European Convention on Human Rights since 2002 and has trained judges, prosecutors, lawyers and police officers in the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights across the Council of Europe. She has acted as a legal representative or advisor in several cases before the European Court of Human Rights. She is the co-founder and former chair of the European Implementation Network, Europe’s leading civil society organization that advocates for the full and effective implementation of human rights judgments.