IntLawGrrls at Oxford

???????????????????????????????IntlawGrrls Fiona de Londras and Stephanie Farrior find themselves both spending a sabbatical leave as Visiting Fellows at the University of Oxford, Fiona with the Oxford Human Rights Hub, and Stephanie with Kellogg College.  They’re looking forward to going punting on the Cherwell later this spring!

Fiona, a professor of law at Durham University, is past co-director of the Durham Human Rights Centre; her inaugural address: Counter-Terrorism Everywhere.  Her current projects address counter-terrorism, constitutionalism and human rights, and human rights and gender, with a particular focus on abortion law reform in Ireland.  Her most recent book is Critical Debates on Counter-Terrorist Judicial Review (Fergal F. Davis & Fiona de Londras, eds) from Cambridge University Press; SSRN link to her chapter, Counter-Terrorist Judicial Review as Regulatory Constitutionalism.

Stephanie, a professor at Vermont Law School and director of its Center for Applied Human Rights, recently published Equality and Non-Discrimination under International Law (Ashgate Publishing); SSRN link to her introductory chapter.  Her current research examines legal issues in the linkages between human rights and environmental protection.  Farrior and two of her students recently worked with Article 19 on the report A Dangerous Shade of Green: Threats to Environmental Human Rights Defenders and Journalists in Europe, which was launched at the Aarhus Compliance Committee session last June; coverage of the report by The Japan Times: Inside the Trenches of Environmental Rights.

Human Rights and Planet Earth

Global warming

This particular exchange caught my eye in the latest issue of the Human Rights Quarterly, in Thomas Krapf’s “The Last Witness to the Drafting Process of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Interview with Stéphane Frédéric Hessel.”

Krapf: Did the authors of the Declaration, as they were working on the text, have any awareness that they might be missing opportunities of obtaining agreement on important issues?

Hessel: To begin with, let’s say that at the time there was a problem which was not even taken up. This is the issue of man’s relating to the planet; the issue, which today, we call environmental problems. Today, these have become extremely important. At that time they were not taken into account. It was believed that the resources of the earth could be exploited indefinitely, that it would be possible to continue developing all forms of growth without running the risk of many failures. Today, we know that these failures are looming, and that they are already very close at hand. Possibly, it will not be possible to live on this earth.

HRQ Vol. 35, No. 3, August 2013, pp. 753-768

For additional commentary on environmental devastation from a human rights perspective, see Dr. Joel  Filartiga’s eloquent remarks quoted in the IntLawGrrl post Dr. Filartiga, torture and the environment.