Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast

In a digital age, where content creators are booming, shaping culture, influencing politics, and building entire livelihoods online, we find ourselves in a world governed by algorithms we didn’t design, and often can’t even see. So what does it mean to resist? From viral content that defies the odds, to artists and activists who quietly tweak the system to stay visible, today we explore the subtle...

In this episode, we explore the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) — often hailed as the “conscience of Europe” and one of the most successful human rights institutions in the world. But in an era of democratic backsliding, populist politics, and eroding faith in institutions, what does “justice” look like today? Drawing on eight years of fieldwork with advocates, lawyers, and judges at the ECH...

What does it mean to imagine another humanity in a century marked by war, displacement, and deep inequality? In this episode, we sit down with Benjamin P. Davis , author of Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt . Davis traces shifting ideas of “the human” through the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, and Edward Said—thinkers who redefined human rights...

Welcome back to Declarations! In this episode, we’re joined by renowned journalist Kalpana Jain to explore how the media landscape has evolved and how press freedom is shifting across the globe. From the West to South Asia, we unpack the complex forces shaping what gets reported, whose voices are amplified, and how journalism is being redefined today.  The media has undergone a seismic shift over...

Welcome back to the second episode of Season 9 of Declarations! We are often informed to the terrorising, oppressive and distressing effects of Human Rights abuses across the continent of Africa. However, what happens in the rare cases that citizens don't know they're being abused? By exploring the implicitly powerful weapon of censorship, misinformation and mass propaganda, we can observe...

Welcome back to Season 9 of Declarations ! This season we are looking at the notion of Human Rights and The Polycrisis . In our first episode, Co-host Ed Parker sits down with Andrew Preston , an acclaimed historianof American foreign relations post 1890, to trace the role of human rights in American protest movements and foreign policy debates, asking whether humanitarian ideals have ever truly g...

Join our host, Iman, in conversation with Lucy Amis from the University of Cambridge's Centre for Sport & Human Rights (CSHR), alongside our panellist and podcast lead Shubham Jain, as they discuss the need for mainstreaming human rights in sports, and how the CSHR's innovative initiative, the 'Human Rights Volunteer Programme', can help promote human rights during sports event...

Join guest host, Dounia, in conversation with Omar Alshogre as they discuss the relationship between activism and human rights in the context of the Syrian revolution.  What is the future of the Syrian revolution? Has it fallen into oblivion? Will Syrians ever succeed in getting rid of a regime which has been plaguing the country for more than 50 years?

Join our guest host, Maryam, in conversation with special guest Salman Sufi, founder of the Salman Sufi Foundation, as they discuss gender-based violence in Pakistan. How can the systemic infrastructure perpetuate such violence, and what can human rights activists do to mitigate these harms and close some of these systemic gaps?

Join our host, Iman, in conversation with special guests, Uma Chakravarti and Suchitra Vijayan, and our panellist Jigisha Bhattacharya, as they discuss incarceration and its politics in contemporary India, focusing on addressing concerns such as human rights violations, democratic oversight and the silencing of dissident voices.

In the 100th Episode of the Declarations Podcast, Iman is joined by special guest Lucia de los Angeles Diaz Genao and panellist Matias Volonterio to discuss: what can we do about violence against activists? How do we protect the marginalised who raise their voices?

In this episode of Declarations, our host Iman is joined by special guest Siri Gloppen and panellist Charlotte Abercrombie to discuss global democratic backsliding and its impact on human rights. They evaluate the role of courts in safeguarding human rights and the risks of politicising fundamental freedoms. This episode comes at a crucial period, where democracies appear to be in peril worldwide.

In this episode, our host Iman is joined by special guest Tarah Demant and panellist Tess Hargarten to discuss the impact of Western hegemony on modern human rights and the development of human rights organizations worldwide. This topic is especially relevant at the current moment, when multiple contentious wars are raging with more and more human rights violations coming to light.

Who are human rights for? Where is the 'human' in 'human rights'? What have we learned about human rights conceptually, as well as in practice, over the last 75 years? In this brief first episode, our host Iman introduces our theme for this season, and gives an overview of the questions we seek to probe while reflecting on the 75 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Right...

In episode 9 Declarations host Neema Jayasinghe is joined by panellist Aimee Hobley and guest speaker Kristin Hughes. Their discussion explores the potential human rights challenges raised by the ongoing green transition. Kristin offers insight and expertise on how the multistakeholder green transition can mitigate against the potential threats created by rare earth mining and resource insecurity,...

In this episode of Declarations, Neema Jayasinghe and panellist Isabella Todini sit down with Dr. Lorena Gazzotti, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge and Vice President of the Cambridge branch of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) to discuss the right to strike, why lectures across the UK have been striking this year, and why urgent action is needed. We focus on lecture strikes...

In our seventh episode, host Neema Jayasinghe joins panellist Yasmin Homer to discuss the work of women peacebuilders with guests Eva Tabbasam (GAPS UK) and Andrea Filippi (PeaceWomen Across the Globe). We discuss the importance of fostering and protecting civil society networks in peacetime and wartime, the challenges of political will, and how the Women, Peace, Security Agenda needs to expand it...

In our sixth episode, host Neema Jayasinghe is joined by previous podcast host and panellist, Dr Maryam Tanwir. With special guest, Professor Sam Vaknin, the episode unpacks discourses related to the psychology of personal border violations in mental abuse. The conversation questions how borders and boundaries are not only demarcated, violated, or transgressed in global politics, but also at the l...

In this episode, panellist Clare Francis discusses the interplay of poetry and protest in the Iranian state with Dr. Fatemeh Shams, an activist, award-winning poet, and Persian literary scholar. They explore the boundaries of art and activism in Iran, where successive regimes have historically sought to enforce strict limitations around acceptable versus unacceptable forms of activism. Protest mov...

In this episode, host Neema Jayasinghe is joined by panelist Vanessa Dib to discuss developments of lawfare, the power of law being used as a weapon of conflict, with guest Mr. Jason McCue. In this day and age, wars can take place within and outside the traditional confines of borders and boundaries as wars are increasingly started, fought, and ended through lawfare. To better situate the discussi...

In this episode, host Neema Jayasinghe is joined by panellist Olivia Chen and guest Professor Gavin Phillipson to discuss the legal connotations of privacy for public figures. Professor Phillipson provides a detailed insight into how the law utilises both objective and subjective criteria to assess whether a person has a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’, as well as how the status of a public fi...

This episode focuses on assessing the Rwanda Asylum Plan - UK’s most controversial migration policy in recent years. According to the proposal, 99 asylum seekers whose claims were declared “inadmissible” were scheduled to embark on a flight relocating them to Rwanda on the 14th of June 2022. While never enacted, the plan attracted widespread media attention and the criticism of many NGOs fighting...

In our first episode, host Neema Jayasinghe is joined by panellist Charlotte Duthie to discuss the contemporary race for justice in Ukraine with guest Dr. Felicity Gerry KC. The ongoing war in Ukraine has recently hit its year-long mark since the initial Russian invasion in February 2022. This episode will focus on discussing and evaluating the different avenues for achieving transitional justice...

In this first episode of Season 7, we gather our panelists to discuss the topics that will be on our minds this season. From boundaries of activism in the Iranian state to the right to privacy, we’re covering a global range of issues at the cutting edge of human rights advocacy, research and policy.

The Deepfake detection platform Sensity came out with a report in 2019 that 96% of Deepfakes on the internet are pornographic and 90% of those represent women. Deepfakes are a modern form of synthetic media created by two competing AI’s with the goal of replicating hyper-realistic videos, images, and voices. Over the past five years this has led to major concerns of the technology being used to sp...