[Interview] The private is political: León Castellanos-Jankiewicz on human rights histories
Published 7 October 2024
Photo: Majivecka
In a recent interview, Asser researcher León Castellanos-Jankiewicz highlights conflict of laws as a crucial yet overlooked foundation of international human rights law.
Despite its enormous growth in importance, the History of International Law has so far widely neglected conflict of laws. In a recent interview with the Völkerrechtsblog, Asser researcher León Castellanos-Jankiewicz argues that this is particularly true of the historiography of human rights. In his conversation with Hendrik Simon (Goethe University Frankfurt), Castellanos-Jankiewicz talks about the silence between public and private international lawyers, which has caused a lack of awareness about their shared origins, and eclipses the contributions that private law has made to public international law and human rights.
“Human rights histories focus on public law structures like international treaties and state-based constitutional arrangements. But private law made key conceptual contributions to the idea of human rights during the nineteenth century, and these experiences have been disregarded until now”, says Castellanos-Jankiwicz. “The implications are important: as Karen Knop famously observed, private international law can be more cosmopolitan than public law. Following Karen’s insight, one can understand that private law can protect global public goods”.
The interview revolves around an article published recently by Castellanos-Jankiewicz in the Journal of the History of International Law. It is also part of a Völkerrechtsblog symposium series curated by Simon titled ‘International Law and the Political’ which features younger as well as established scholars, focusing on the discussion of new publications on the theory and history of international law as it relates to the political. The symposium has featured Lauren Benton (Yale University), Matthew Specter (UC Berkley), Boyd van Dijk (Oxford), and Ntina Tzouvala (Australian National University), among others.
Read the full interview with open access here.
About León Castellanos-Jankiewicz
Dr León Castellanos-Jankiewicz is a senior researcher in International Law at the Asser Institute and Supervisor of the International Law Clinic on Access to Justice for Gun Violence at the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law. He is currently part of the research strand “In the Public Interest: Accountability of the State and the Prosecution of Crimes.”
Read more
[New publication] Private international law and the making of human rights
In his latest article, ‘A New History for Human Rights: Conflict of Laws as Adjacent Possibility’, published recently in the Journal of the History of International Law, Asser researcher León Castellanos-Jankiewicz highlights conflict of laws as a crucial yet overlooked foundation of international human rights law. Read more.
[Publication] Overlooking continuity: National minorities and ‘timeless’ human rights
In the book chapter ‘Overlooking Continuity: National Minorities and ‘Timeless’ Human Rights’, Asser Institute researcher León Castellanos-Jankiewicz critiques the dominant approach to national minorities in human rights discourse. The author argues that this approach fails to account for the ways in which historical and social contexts shape the experiences of national minorities and their struggles for rights. Read more
[Symposium] Decolonisation and human rights – the Dutch case
The Verfassungsblog-Asser Institute symposium, 'Decolonisation and human rights - the Dutch case', was led by Asser Researcher León Castellanos-Jankiewicz and Wiebe Hommes (University of Amsterdam). The symposium deals with the complicated relationship between decolonisation and human rights. Focusing on the Dutch colonial past, it engages with the ongoing legacies of colonialism to examine human rights both as a language of critique and as a constitutive part of the imperial legacy. Read more
