Speaker 1: Hi everybody and welcome to this first lesson on the study of the International Law on Human Rights. Now, what we're going to do in this lesson is take an introduction to international human rights law more broadly. We're going to talk about some of the challenges that exist in discussing human rights from the perspective of international law, talking about some of the critiques that have been levied against this area of the law, talk about where international human rights may intersect with other areas of public international law and where we have to try and delineate and clearly delimit this area for the purposes of study, and then also talk about the scope of this series of lessons over the next coming weeks and months and talk about the kind of things that we're going to be examining. So the problem with human rights law more generally is that the idea of human rights law in and of itself is a difficult subject to delimit. It's difficult to appropriately see where we're going to be beginning and where we're going to be ending because there are lots of different things and lots of different concepts that really intertwine and interweave with the broader study of human rights law. Now things are made even more difficult when we take this idea of human rights law, take this idea of the problems that exist in the study of human rights law, and then we try and extend that to the international level and talk about international human rights law. So really, just like with the majority of other areas of public international law, as you may or may not already know, the regime and the study and basic origins of international human rights law derives mainly from the post-World War II period. When we talk about, for example, enforcement and application and implementation of international human rights, we tend to do so under the auspices of various United Nations organs and bodies, political institutions. And these are all, of course, institutions that have existed since the Second World War because, of course, the UN didn't exist before. That's not to suggest that there wasn't this language of human rights that existed before the Second World War within, for example, the League of Nations or within the Treaty of Versailles, which we're going to look at in future lessons, but just that the human rights law that we're going to study today, the international human rights law that we're going to examine, is going to be post-World War II for the most part. Which is not something that is too dissimilar to a lot of international law that you will study. For example, if we do international criminal law, for the most part we're talking about everything that's happened since the Second World War. Similar to with that of just general public international law, it's more the case that we are talking about cases from, for example, the International Court of Justice, etc. etc. And there's only very few references to the sort of pre-World War II period. Now, from here, from the post-Second World War period, there are a number of foundational documents as well as institutional establishments. If we talk about human rights law from a very broad perspective, not just talking about international human rights, but looking at regional protection of human rights law, of course one of the most important and substantive instruments and one of the most substantive judicial systems within the international human rights law regime is that, of course, of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Now, we are not going to study the ECHR in this series of lessons because we already have a number of lessons already that we're covering on the substantive law of the European Convention on Human Rights. So, that's almost going to be seen as a regional approach to human rights law, whereas this is a more broad international approach to human rights law. So, let's begin by thinking about the problem with human rights. When looking at making a series of lessons on international human rights, there are a number of challenges that I have had to address in this process. So, the first of these is the question of what is the scope of this series? What is the scope of this series of lessons? I've already mentioned previously that it is difficult to delimit where human rights law begins and where human rights law ends, and it's also important to remember that there are certain specific areas of international human rights law that probably merit their own series of lessons in and of themselves. So, for example, does international human rights law include the international law on child rights, the international law on the rights of children? And the answer to this question is, of course, yes, within the broader scope of international human rights law, but international child law is a series of lessons that I want to do in and of itself, because you can almost delimit the general international human rights law that exists, and that of international law in relation to the protection of children, i.e. the rights of the child convention and all of the things that go along with it. In addition to this, what about the intersection with international human rights at other branches of international law? We're going to see quite clearly that there is a broad intersection between international human rights, international criminal law, which we have already studied, and international humanitarian law, which we are studying alongside this series. International criminal law being, of course, the law in relation to the regulation of the most heinous crimes of humanity, so, for example, genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression, and international humanitarian law covering the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions, the Jus in Bello. So, essentially, where we see international criminal law and international humanitarian law, there are also issues and questions relating to human rights. And from a theoretical perspective, from the perspective of what actually is human rights law more broadly, not necessarily looking at the substantive doctrinal issues, the idea that international humanitarian law is just one subset of a broad human rights framework is something that is quite a palatable argument. I would argue personally that the protection of prisoners of war and the protection of civilians is something of a human rights issue, but it is framed within this nexus of international and non-international armed conflicts when we talk about it through the perspective of IHL. You also have the critique, of course, that IHL and the main instruments that derive IHL come before, at least temporally, that of international human rights instruments. And you could make the argument there that this suggests that they are distinct areas of the law, but you could also make the argument that humanitarian law is just one subset of a growing movement in towards international human rights, something that happens quite a lot at the end of the Second World War. All of these different things and different ideas are very theoretical, they're very theoretical in nature, and they're not talking necessarily about the deep and doctrinal issues and the actual substantive law of human rights specifically. The final point I want to note before we look at the scope of this series is looking at the idea of enforcement of human rights norms. Now one of the problems when we talk about human rights law from the international perspective is the issue of state sovereignty and that of the enforcement of these rules, because one could argue that due to the fact that there is a distinct lack of enforcement in a lot of different areas when it comes to international human rights principles, there is a clear indication that human rights as a general structural framework does not even exist within international law, and so many critiques of international human rights law may levy their arguments in this kind of way. They may suggest that there is less of an area of law that even exists when we talk about international human rights because of the fact that there is problems when it comes to the enforcement of these rules and these regulations, and we'll get into the nature of enforcement in future lessons. So according to the preamble of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights from 1948, an instrument that we're going to become familiar with quite well over the course of this series of lessons, the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is a foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. This gives us the broad perspective of the rights of all members of humanity, the idea that human rights are universal to everybody, the only thing that is delineating a human right applicable is whether or not that person is human. Of course every human is human, and so that's the only thing that we're going to be making delineations from, and they're talking about the fact that this is a foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, talking about and framing human rights as one of the most foundational elements to this broader mandate that international law may have, which is in relation to the the pursuance of freedom, the pursuance of justice on the international scale, and the pursuance of peace for everybody on planet earth. That is a very positive outlook in terms of a very positive way in which we can understand and view international law quite broadly, and it's quite a nice way of understanding international law. Now of course there are challenges to that interpretation, but if we were to accept that interpretation that one of the purposes of international law is the promotion of freedom, justice and peace, of course we're going to place human rights as one of the central characteristics of international law, and one of the central characteristics that we have to study. So let's think about the study of this series, the scope of this series. We're going to begin by talking about the theoretical foundations of international human rights law, and we're going to be looking for example at the nature of human rights as a concept broadly within international law, as well as different theoretical approaches to the study of international human rights. And then we will talk for only one lesson I believe on looking at the history and historical development of the current regime. I think it's always important when we look at international law that we look at the history that brings us to the present day essentially, looking at how these things have developed and looking at the motivating factors, looking at the various different agreements that have come and gone since the foundational documents in international human rights. And then we're going to actually start to explore some of the foundational rights themselves. So we're going to talk about for example freedom from discrimination, or at least the right to self-determination. There'll be other ones like religious freedoms as well, right to life exists within an international perspective, as well as some others. And then what we're going to do is talk about the implementation framework for international human rights law. So we're going to talk specifically about the way in which treaty law systems operate in relation to the application and implementation of human rights, as well as the systems and institutions that exist within and under the auspices of the United Nations as a method of implementing human rights as well.