Past Research Workshops
In recent years, policing and prosecution tactics have dramatically impacted activists and members of social movements working on issues such as environmental and climate justice, racial justice, LGBTQI+ rights, migrant rights, indigenous rights, and anti-apartheid campaigns. The increasing risks of violence, detention and surveillance faced by these communities raise fundamental concerns about the constitutional space for legitimate political speech and action, including civil disobedience. The conference provided a forum for discussing the challenges that these communities face, as well as strategies - legal, political and organizational - for confronting this crackdown. We also discussed the impacts that these repressive actions have had on public forums of political speech and action and democratic institutions.
The conference departed from traditional academic formats in various ways. The seventy-five participants roughly included equal numbers of academics, activists, and legal practitioners, which allowed both for a productive exchange of experiences, perspectives, and strategies and for a lively discussion of the relation between academia, legal practice, and activism. The program did not include any formal presentations, let alone keynote lectures, but consisted of in-depth workshops in which all participants participated equally. The morning workshops were organized around specific causes: climate and environmental justice; justice for Palestine; racial justice and migration; and gender and queer justice. The afternoon sessions thematized different modes of legal and political pressure and protest: digital surveillance; securitization; SLAPPs and other forms of lawfare, and transnational activist networks.
Thanks to generous financial support from Tilburg Law School, the Department of Public Law and Governance, the ERC project Translitigate, the International Institute for Social Studies, the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Consortium, and the Netherlands Network of Human Rights Research, we were able to invite various participants from the Global South, which decentered Eurocentric perspectives on global issues, and allowed us not only to discuss how new modes of repressing protest “travel” transnationally and can be forms of legal mobilization in their own right, but also to learn from and connect modes of resisting these modes of repression through other forms of legal mobilization.
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the vital importance of everyone’s right to health. The pandemic also shone a spotlight on all of the pre-existing structural inequalities in our societies, with disproportionate burdens falling to communities exposed to racial discrimination, in particular women and those of low socio-economic status. There has since been increasing interest in health and its underlying determinants - particularly racism. The UN UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, lead by Tina Stavrinaki, has begun drafting a General Recommendation (n°37) on racial discrimination and the right to health under Article 5 (e)(iv) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). A workshop hosted by Julie Fraser in Utrecht brought together a diverse group of multidisciplinary experts to discuss the first draft of this forthcoming General Recommendation. Participants working at the intersection of health and racial discrimination examined the concept of ‘health’, the impact of racial discrimination on Roma communities, refugees and migrants, as well as the domestic situation of racial discrimination in the Netherlands.
Please find an elaborate and comprehensive summary of the event here.
The relationships between human rights and natural resources are often complex and multi-faceted. This is an especially timely discussion demonstrated by the ongoing erosion of planetary boundaries and increasing calls for sustainable development. In recognition of these complexities, the one-day Workshop on Human Rights and Natural Resources, held on 12 October 2023, stimulated discussion with a view to having a more holistic approach to the topic. The workshop was hosted by the Erasmus School of Law and was supported by the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research and the small grants scheme of the research initiatives Rebalancing Public & Private Interests and Erasmus Center of Empirical Legal Studies. The wonderful organising committee was made up of Leonie Reins, Alberto Quintavalla and Candice Foot. Against this backdrop, the workshop addressed topics related to the complexity of balancing the scarcity of natural resources, the accessibility of natural resources necessary for the realisation of human rights, and the societal imperative to ensure the protection of both. The presentations demonstrated that natural resources are at the foundation of multiple human rights and that the preservation of one is integral to the protection of the other.
Please read the full report on the workshop here.
Human-induced climate change is now the pre-eminent threat to human and planetary health. Its impacts are already widespread and disruptive for many communities and are expected to worsen in the coming decades. Urgent action is needed; according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the scale of (in)action until 2030 will determine our own future and that of human generations for hundreds, and likely thousands, of years to come. Advancing the notion that climate change is a major factor for the universal enjoyment of human rights, the workshop co-hosted by the Groningen Centre for Health Law and Tilburg Law School explored the current state of climate science, the impact of climate change on societies and the ensuing effect on human rights, as well as the emotional toll on students and researchers.
Recommendations from the workshop included the development of a teaching guide, facilitating internships and courses in other faculties, inviting guest lecturers from other disciplines, exploring the intersectionality of climate change with other types of discrimination, and exploring the rights of nature and of future generations in the context of climate change. A key outcome of the workshop was the proposal for a NNHRR working group on climate change and human rights which seeks will bring together academics studying the multifaceted ways in which climate change affects human rights.
Read the report on the event here.
NNHRR members interested in becoming a member of the working group should contact David Patterson at d.w.patterson@rug.nl.