2024 Conference

THIRD CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON HUMAN RIGHTS CONFERENCE
NEW YORK, APRIL 17-19, 2024

At CCNY's Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education (CCNY CWE)
Located at 25 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10004

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights will celebrate its 75th birthday on December 10, 2023. Since that statement of principles following the mass atrocities of WWII, the world has witnessed the spread of human rights discourse, norms, law, and institutions at both the domestic and international levels. Eleanor Roosevelt’s prediction that “a curious grapevine” would spread the ideas articulated in that 1948 General Assembly document seems to have come to fruition. Nevertheless, the aspirations of the Declaration remain far from fulfilled, as grave violations of rights continue to be perpetrated around the globe, often with impunity.  Economic inequality, racism, sexism, and multiple refugee crises have engendered and exacerbated the rise of political extremism.  Addressing such issues, as well as many others, the Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference aims to explore the contested legacy of human rights in increasingly uncertain times.  It seeks to foster dialogue and scholarship from a wide range of perspectives. Some conference presenters are scholars and activists who continue to view the human rights project as a moral and ethical challenge to power; others see it as an enabler of political and economic domination. The Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference participants seek to reassess the origins, foundations, and contemporary forms of human rights discourse, ideas, and practice today, seventy-five years on.

The Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference is part of a larger initiative at The City College of New York, CUNY, shared between the President’s Office, the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies, the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, and the Division of Humanities and the Arts, and dedicated to human rights studies, public programming, and scholarship.

SCHEDULE

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
IRENE VICTORIA MASSIMINO
The Crime of Genocide
Understanding the Legal Concept Through Current Conflicts: The Cases of Armenia and Ukraine
Wednesday, April 17, 2024 | Time TBD
In-Person | Auditorium
 

Irene Victoria Massimino is a lawyer specialized in international criminal law and human rights. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences of the National University of La Plata, in Argentina; has a Master of Laws from Robert H. McKinney School of Law at Indiana University, in the United States of America, where she is currently residing, and teaching as a visiting professor. She is a Professor at Universidad Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), Buenos Aires, Argentina. She also holds a Master of Arts and Humanities in Human Rights from the School of Advanced Studies of the University of London, in the United Kingdom. Ms. Massimino has served as Rapporteur of the High Criminal Court of Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, where she focused on institutional violence, police brutality and gender violence cases, many of which became leading jurisprudence and became internationally known for their contribution to human rights. In this capacity, she became a member of the Provincial Roundtable for Discussions to address the emergency situation in Buenos Aires Province’s Prison System. She works actively in the fields of internal and international conflicts, human rights violations, and atrocity crimes -especially genocide- in relation to the experiences of Argentina, Armenia, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh), Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Iraq, Somaliland, and Ukraine. She has served in international investigative delegations and trial observation missions, and she is the former co-founding president of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention.

BOOK TALK:
BRUCE CRONIN'S
Purging the Odious Scourge of Atrocities: The Limits of Consent in International Law
Thursday, April 18, 2024 | 3 - 4:30 PM
In-Person | Auditorium

Purging the Odious Scourge of Atrocities explains the growth of a small body of human rights law that bans the use of violence against a state's own population when it is deemed a mass atrocity. These laws are binding on all states regardless of whether they have accepted it by signing treaties, or whether it is consistent with widespread state practice. Yet, this challenges the doctrine of consent, which has traditionally been the foundation of international law. Bruce Cronin argues that qualitative changes in the form of global governance are leading to an expansion in the theoretical underpinnings of international law and its role in contemporary world politics. Specifically, in limited and well-defined areas of international law, states have begun to recognize the authority of collective international consensus over individual state consent as the source of some legal rules.

Cronin supports this theory by examining the degree to which the international community has, via multilateral conferences among states, developed a consensus around the legal control of "excessive internal state violence"--that is, a level of coercive force that the international community considers to be disproportionate and illegitimate for pursuing state interests within its own borders. These practices, which the Genocide Convention refers to as an "odious scourge", include widespread, systematic attacks on civilian populations; violent persecution of defined groups (including genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid); torture; and the violation of civilian immunity in internal armed conflicts. In these cases, state action is subject to general international law that overrides their consent. By allowing us to rethink the mechanisms that give international law actual force, Purging the Odious Scourge of Atrocities promises to reshape our understanding of why states are required to abide by human rights norms they never consented to by treaty or customary practice.

PANELISTS:

ORGANIZERS