Facts and Norms in Human Rights Assessment: Can human rights compliance be measured?

This webinar lecture will present different models of relying on empirical facts in the assessment of human rights compliance. Professor Scheinin will relate to his three decades of experiences from:

1) UN Human Rights Committee examination of periodic reports by states,

2) the UN project to develop human rights indicators,

3) the EU-funded SURVEILLE project for the assessment of the utility, ethics and law of surveillance technology through multidisciplinary expert panels,

4) assessing countries' strategies against COVID-19 for their conformity of all human rights of all members of society,

5) assessing emerging AI applications through multidisciplinary expert panels.  

Martin Scheinin is part-time professor of human rights law at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and at Lund University (Sweden). He has served as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee, as a UN Special Rapporteur and as a member of the Scientific Committee of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency. Before his international career he was professor of constitutional law at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and afterwards professor of constitutional and international law at Åbo Akademi University (Finland).

The event will be moderated by Veronika Bílková (Senior Researcher, Centre for International Law, Institute of International Relations Prague).

Please register for the event using this link. We look forward to seeing you there! 

Webinar Series Overview
The Human Rights Justification: Empirical Webinar Series, part of the Horizon Europe HRJust project, explores how states invoke human rights to justify legislation and political decisions, focusing on climate change, migration, and COVID-19. The webinar series is organized by IIR research team members of the HRJust project, Dr Federica Cristani and Ms Barbora Lukešová.

The series fosters knowledge sharing on these themes, emphasizing inclusive democracy, gender, intersectionality, and sociological and anthropological perspectives. You can find more information on the  Intersect Observatory's digital library .