Litigating Rights Lecture: Law versus Power - Wolfgang Kaleck (ECCHR) in conversation with Ben Wizner (ACLU)
The Bonavero Institute is delighted that Wolfgang Kaleck, founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, have accepted our invitation to be the first renowned human rights litigators in our new series of conversations “Litigating Rights”.
Wolfgang Kaleck is a leading German lawyer and distinguished human rights activist. For more than two decades, he has been involved in the global struggle to hold powerful people and governments accountable for human rights abuses fighting alongside those suffering injustice at the hands of powerful perpetrators who, too often, enjoy impunity. He is the founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin, an organization that has prepared numerous important legal actions against politicians, military leaders, and corporations for crimes against humanity. By recounting in Law versus Power his involvement in numerous human rights cases, Wolfgang gives full voice to those he is representing, emphasizing the courage and persistence they bring to the global fight for justice.
Ben Wizner is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. For nearly two decades, he has worked at the intersection of civil liberties and national security, litigating numerous cases involving airport security policies, government watch lists, surveillance practices, targeted killing, and torture. He appears regularly in the global media, has testified before Congress, and is an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law. Since July of 2013, he has been the principal legal advisor to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Ben is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law.
Wolfgang Kaleck will open the evening with a reading from his book, Law versus Power. This will be followed by a moderated conversation between Wolfgang Kaleck and Ben Wizner, an open Q&A, then a drinks reception.
On our Litigating Rights Series:
Litigation as a tool for the promotion and protection of human rights has been employed in jurisdictions all over the world in recent decades. Yet the question when litigation will be an apt tool for promoting human rights continues to be debated, as does the question what impact that litigation has. This conversation series will invite legal practitioners who have litigated human rights in different jurisdictions around the world, including national and supranational courts, to explore in a public conversation a range of questions relating to the role and value of litigation in the promotion and protection of human rights.
In convening this series of conversations, the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights hopes to foster robust and open conversations about some of the most important questions for constitutional and human rights lawyers everywhere. It seeks as well to foster conversations between scholars engaged in human rights research and practitioners engaged in litigating rights.
The series will run in tandem with the Bonavero Institute’s Adjudicating Rights conversation series in which judges are asked to reflect upon the role of the judiciary in protecting and promoting rights in their jurisdictions. The Litigating Rights series, like the Adjudicating Rights series, should deepen our understanding of the role that law can play in protecting and promoting human rights.
Each term a litigator will be invited to participate in this series, just as in each term a judge is invited to participate in the Adjudicating Rights series. The conversations are audio-recorded and, where consent is obtained, are published to the web.