Decolonising Human Rights through an African Lens

The Bonavero Institute of Human Rights is delighted to host a lecture on Decolonising Human Rights Through an African Lens with Charles Ngwena.

This lecture explores how the discourse of decolonisation can be framed and applied to human rights law to respond to the legacies of colonialism. International human rights are an appropriate site for decolonisation because, epistemologically and consequentially, they are entangled in coloniality. ‘Universal’ human rights were forged out of a historical process that was principally shaped by Western milestones, namely the Enlightenment, the Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the Holocaust. The histories of colonised peoples were marginal concerns. Decolonising human rights means revealing and transforming colonising and dichotomising structures in the making of universal human rights. It is a demand for pluriversal justice. Pluriversality is not a desire for separation from the rest of the world but, as Arturo Escobar underscores in Designs for the Pluriverse, an expression of radical autonomy juxtaposed with interdependence. The lecturer will argue for pluriversality mediated by intersectionality as a decolonial method for countering colonising universalism in international human rights discourses.

Speaker

Charles Ngwena LLB, LLM, LLD, Barrister-at-Law, is Professor of Law in the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria. Charles publishes at intersection between human rights and health, including reproductive and sexual health with a focus on the African region. He also publishes in the fields of disability rights, and race, and culture. He serves on editorial committees and editorial boards of a number of international journals. He is the Convening Editor of the African Disability Rights Yearbook, Section Editor of Developing World Bioethics (for Law and Bioethics) and associate editor of the International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of African Law, Stellenbosch Law Review, African Journal of Disability and Human Rights Law Review. He is a co-editor of Employment equity law (Butterworths, 2001), Health and human rights (Ashgate, 2007), Strengthening sexual and reproductive rights in the African region through human rights (Pretoria University Law Press, 2014) and Advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in Africa (Routledge, 2021). He is the author of What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities (Pretoria University Law Press, 2018).

Online profile:  https://www.chr.up.ac.za/centre-staff/charles-ngwena

Moderator

Shreya Atrey is an Associate Professor in International Human Rights Law based at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. She is an Editor for the Human Rights Law Review and an Official Fellow of Kellogg College. Her research is on discrimination law, feminist theory, poverty and disability law. Her monograph, Intersectional Discrimination (OUP 2019), which won the runners-up Peter Birks Book Prize in 2020, presents an account of intersectionality theory in comparative discrimination law. Her work has been cited by the South African Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of India. Shreya is currently working on project on 'Equality Law in Times in Crisis' funded by the British Academy. Previously, Shreya was based at the University of Bristol Law School as a Lecturer in Law. She was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence and a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at the NYU School of Law, New York. She completed BCL with distinction and DPhil in Law on the Rhodes Scholarship from Magdalen College, University of Oxford.

Online profile: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/people/shreya-atrey

If you have any questions about this event, please do not hesitate to email freya.baetens@law.ox.ac.uk.