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.