Sep 30, 2010
The Rights Future: A New Collaborative Human Rights Project
Conor Gearty Professor of Law at the London School of Economics will launch a new initiative entitled The Rights’ Future on Wednesday October 6th in London. For more details see the LSE Website here. The Rights’ Future is a collaborative writing project aimed at the production of a book, which will be launched at LSE’s Literary Festival early in 2011. Professor Gearty will release a series of weekly essays online that examine the history of human rights, address their present state and set out some of the possible futures for human rights. The premise of the project is that human rights are:
Too important to be left to lawyers but too subversive to be handed over to the politicians alone, human rights need the intellectuals, the workers and the streets if their model of a new kind of society has any chance of beginning to be built.
Each of the essays will serve as a focus for online consultation and debate and the discussions will be factored into the ideas set out in the essays. This is an interesting project as it is not a solely academic enterprise. The project seeks to examine human rights and their relevance in a practical and collaborative way through a discussion with a wide audience including school goers and members of the public. The project will allow for alternative essays and for votes on different propositions and for the development of divergent perspectives. The progress of the book and participation in the project will be facilitated through the use of its website which will go live on the 6th of October.
