International Human Rights Law

The international law of human rights has evolved considerably in the last couple of decades. From its early focus on traditional civil liberties, the field has burgeoned to include the study of socio-economic rights, women’s rights, disability rights, rights of indigenous peoples and also includes thriving discourses on the doctrines, history, critiques and future of international human rights law. The field thus encompasses a wide and substantial range of issues in public international law today. These issues are both substantive and structural in nature: that is, they relate to specific topics to do with the substantive core of specific rights in international law (What are human rights in international law? Are they universal? Are they extraterritorial?); as well as, their situatedness within the larger structure or ‘constitution’ of the field of public international law (What are the sources of international human rights law? Are they different from sources of public international law? What are human rights obligations under international law? Who owes these obligations and to whom? How are the obligations enforced?).

This course critically examines both the substance and structure of the field of international human rights law. The main idea is to address the international law of human rights as a semi-autonomous (if not self-contained) regime within the legal order known as public international law. The course will encourage and facilitate academic intellectual engagement with the field of international human rights law, resisting the typical approaches of it being characterised as either overly descriptive or even normatively inert (as is sometimes the case in respect of ‘institutions’ of human rights, such as the European Court of Human Rights). It will thus blend conceptual and practical approaches to systematise the study of the field as a whole.

The course will allow students to develop a deep and critical understanding of the field of international human rights law. International instruments (both regional and international) will form the basis of exploration from both a theoretical (conceptual/normative) and a doctrinal (including practical) perspective. This is an advanced course, and thus the knowledge of public international law or human rights or both may be desirable, though not essential. This option will not be offered in 2024-25.