Can human rights survive?

2005 Hamlyn Lectures - can human rights survive?

Professor Conor Gearty, Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and Professor of Human Rights Law at LSE, gives the 2005 Hamlyn Lectures this November.

Professor Gearty's lectures consider whether the subject of human rights can survive what he identifies as the three crises that the idea is facing at the present time. He also analyses what the subject needs to do if it is to meet its current challenges and prosper in the future. The three lectures will be held at LSE (10 November), Durham (15 November) and Belfast (17 November).

Conor Gearty's first of lecture, The Crisis of Authority, asks how an idea as apparently so rooted in truth as human rights can be made to work in our age of relativism, uncertainty and anxiety. It will be chaired by Stephen Sedley, Lord Justice in the Court of Appeal.

Professor Gearty, also a founding member of Matrix Chambers, will be the latest in a long line of judges, legal academics and experts to deliver these prestigious lectures, held each autumn. The series first began 56 years ago in 1949, when Lord Denning spoke on Freedom under the Law. Other speakers have included Lord Woolf, Lord Scarman, LSE emeritus professor Michael Zander and last year's lecturer Sir Bob Hepple QC FBA.

Writing about his choice of subject matter for the lectures, Professor Gearty commented: 'For years the subject of human rights was on the margin of legal and political debate, supported with zeal by the few and ignored by the many. Then, with the end of the Cold War came recognition, prestige and immense influence. Democracy everywhere redefined itself to make human rights an essential part of its make-up rather than the subversion of true majority rule that it had long been believed to be. By the start of the new millennium, the idea of human rights was well-entrenched as the key ethic of its age, the moral music that was to accompany 'the end of history'.

'It has not worked out quite like this. Through the genius and hard work of our predecessors, we have been able to carve out for ourselves a civilised niche in a small, accidentally perfect place floating in a universe that is otherwise unknowable. To survive and to continue to thrive, we urgently need a new way of explaining ourselves to each other and saying how it is we fit where we happen to be. If the idea of human rights manages to survive its current problems, it can provide exactly this guidance and direction. No other narrative even begins to compete. We all have a stake in the outcome.'

The Crisis of Authority is on Thursday 10 November at 6.30pm in the Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A. This event is free and open to all but a ticket is required. Tickets will be available from 10am on Monday 31 October at www.lse.ac.uk/events