Lunch seminar with Natasa Mavronicola

Reasons to Rethink Human Rights Penality

Human rights law is often associated with the protection of personal autonomy and freedom against coercive and carceral State power, with viewing the criminalisation and coercive suppression of human activity with suspicion, and with closely safeguarding criminal suspects and defendants from excesses, abuses, and arbitrariness in the operation of the State’s penal apparatus. Yet human rights law, as interpreted and applied by authoritative bodies, is also replete with positive obligations to criminalise, police, criminally investigate, prosecute and punish human rights violations. This phenomenon may be referred to as ‘human rights penality’. In this talk, I make the case for rethinking human rights penality from the perspective of a constructively critical supporter of human rights. I identify some of the key ways in which human rights penality is bad for human rights, and invite those committed to human rights to rethink in more protective terms the obligations to which human rights penality is attached.

Speaker bio

Natasa Mavronicola is Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Birmingham. Natasa researches and teaches in the areas of human rights, public law, and legal theory, as well as on the interplay between counter-terrorism and human rights and intersections between human rights and criminal justice. She has published on these topics in a number of journals and edited collections. Her recent monograph, Torture, Inhumanity and Degradation under Article 3 of the ECHR: Absolute Rights and Absolute Wrongs (Hart Publishing 2021), examines the concept of an absolute right and its concretisation in the right not to be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. A book she has co-edited with Dr Laurens Lavrysen, titled Coercive Human Rights (Hart Publishing 2020), explores the prospects and pitfalls of mobilising the criminal law and criminal justice apparatus through human rights.

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https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/62342211989?pwd=eU9pSnQ5bU45Z3dxVDkvR05hZ0lyZz09

Meeting ID: 623 4221 1989
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