Human Rights Conception in Contemporary World: Theoretical Approaches and Application Practices

Organizers: Department of Applied Political Sciences at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Campus of Saint-Petersburg; IPSA Research Committee №26 on Human Rights; Research Committee on Human Rights of Russian Association of Political Science (RAPS)

Professor Alexander Sungurov, Chair of Programmers Committee

The concept of human rights universality plays an important role in the contemporary world, but it has both ardent supporters and equally sincere opponents. On the basis of this concept, the whole system of international law was beginning to be developed, at the same time disagreement and opposition toward this concept is growing in the form of bringing to absolute the sovereignty of individual states. The development of institutions for Human Rights promotion and protection at the interstate, state and non-state levels is also experiencing problems at nowadays in a number of countries, including Russia. In this situation, there is also a trend to dogmatization of the very concept of Human Rights, unwillingness to discuss the accumulated problems and controversial aspects within the emerging Human Rights theory.

Based on this issues, forthcoming discussions within the October Readings – 2019 will be focused on the following problematic sectors:

(1) main trends in the development of the concept of Human Rights universality, accumulated problems and possible solutions;
(2) development of institutions for Human Rights protection and promotion at the international, national and regional levels, including any problems of this development;
(3) the universality of Human Rights versus the sovereignty of states;
(4) the experience of human rights protection: concrete cases in comparative perspective.

A distinguish specialists in human rights field are invited as guest speakers. Between them – professor Michael Fedotov, chair of presidential commission for civil society and human rights, who will guest speaker at the first day of conference, and Vyacheslav Bahmin, chair of commission for heritage of Academician Andrey Saharov, member of Moscow Helsinki Group.

Applications with the annotation of future report (150-200 words), please, provide not later April 1, 2019 to the secretary of the Conference Anna Zakharova by the following email: aesemikova@edu.hse.ru

Conference languages – Russian and English.

We invite you to send your proposals!