Human Rights in times of crisis and conflict

This 18-hour class will examine a selected number of human rights issues focusing particularly in exceptional situations. While becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of human rights, students will be particularly familiarized with specific, challenging human rights issues in the current international context, calling for a more topical approach.

During the last decades, safeguarding of human rights became a primordial field of international law and politics. However, assuring human rights protection during exceptional situations, that is circumstances that call for an urgent and sometimes original approach, is increasingly difficult. Armed conflicts, national security and public order threats, pandemics, natural catastrophes and climate change are only some of the major exceptional situations that societies face today. Calling for the respect of human rights in these cases is faced with various challenges concerning the applicability, the content and the application of relevant human rights rules. At the same time, due to the multitude of existing frameworks and the effectiveness of control mechanisms, human rights are often a viable recourse for actors seeking to obtain redress for the violation of broader international obligations.

The course will address the current state of human rights in emergencies, their interaction with politics, the impact of all relevant actors and, finally, the perspectives of emergence and evolution of a human rights regime of emergencies.