Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast

Welcome to Season 3 of Declarations. This episode introduces our brand new team of regular panelists, as well as this year's three themes: Memory, Community, and Futures.

In this special episode, we sat down with Jackson Odong of the Refugee Law Project, and Shama Ams from the Centre of Development Studies, to discuss justice in post-conflict and post-colonial contexts. Jackson describes the important role of documenting memory, while Shama speaks to the possibility for rights and weaponisation of citizenship. Are there alternative routes to justice and rights outs...

In this episode we talked about external borders and internal politics, trying to get to grips with what democracies owe refugees. As a long-standing former policy-maker and MP, Lord Smith helped us shed light on the domestic dimensions of the politics of the Syrian refugee crisis.

Declarations went to Washington DC earlier this year to talk to researchers and practitioners who are dealing with disinformation. While there we met Alexa Koenig, Executive Director at the Berkeley Human Rights Center. Alexa has had an illustrious career working in the arts, education and politics, before making the jump to a career in Law and Human Rights in particular. She's the author of the h...

The Copenhagen Declaration - adopted April this year - unveiled tensions about the relationship between democracy and human rights. If human rights are universal, then they are not only for voting citizens. The views of the citizen majority in any given nation might not be in support of protecting the rights of minorities – non-citizens who cannot vote are particularly vulnerable. However, the alt...

Listen to the full extract on our latest episode.

In this episode, we are joined by Helen Jennings and Caitlin de Jode, who are organising a conference on ‘The Development of Abortion Rights in a Changing Europe’; the first of its kind in Cambridge. Helen, Caitlin, and their team, want to bring together scholars, activists and experts on the matter, to talk about how we can develop a meaningful framework through which abortion rights - amidst bre...

Is Human Rights just a fable? To uncover this question, we venture down 'history' lane with Professor Samuel Moyn. What’s so special about the 1970s, and how does how we think about the emergence of human rights impact how we think of what human rights are, and what they are supposed to do? Join us and find out on this episode of Declarations.

In this episode, we talk about race, racism, borders, and human rights. What kinds of borders are erected around the rights you have - and the rights you don’t? Are human rights a language of liberation from structural oppression, or can it be an oppressive language itself? How can we decide? We were joined by Dr Monica Moreno Figueroa, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge...

In this episode, we talk about the law, politics, and human rights implications of drones and targeted killings. What can international humanitarian law tell us about the legal status of rights? Can human rights prevent drone strikes? Should they - and if so, how? We were joined by Christof Heyns, the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. Today, he serve...

In this episode, we talk about occupation, refugee rights, and the status of Palestine. Are there systematic ways to remedy human rights abuses against an occupied people? How has human rights language been used to facilitate occupation? What can be done? We were joined by Dr Ruba Salih (SOAS), expert on Transnational Migration and Gender, and Odette Murray, who is a lecturer in Law.

In this episode, we look at global economic institutions, and their role in human rights. Dr Shailaja Fennell joined us to discuss questions of whether institutions can advance, or inhibit human rights? What can we learn from failures in development, and how can lessons learned be used as a srping-board for tackling issues of gender, education and inequality?

In this episode, we discuss the weaponisation of human rights, i.e. are human rights always "good"; or are they at times used for more sinister ends? How has the use of human rights changed from the days in which they paved the way for movements around the globe, from the civil rights movement to the struggle to end apartheid, till today? Helping us delve into these murky waters, we were joined by...

On this episode, we discussed refugee rights in international and domestic contexts. We were joined by Sociology PhD student, Rabia Nasimi, who - drawing on her own experience - talked us through the importance of people's individual backgrounds in matters of integration. The conversation also covered the role of grassroots organisations as compared to larger movements and institutions, and questi...

This week we spoke with Mbalenhle Matandela who was an active voice in the Right to Protest and Rhodes Must Fall campaigns in South Africa and is now a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. We discussed the various modes of protest and resistance, artificial impositions of notions of order, the politics of space and why 'armchair activists' have a crucial role to play.

In this episode, we talk about human rights and intervention, in the context of international institutions and their role in enforcing rights. Do local contexts matter? What are the everyday realities of countries subject to decrees by the International Criminal Court? And do rights belong to the individual or the community? Dr Njoki Wamai, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Gover...

What does cultural heritage mean, who can claim it, and what does it have to do with rights? With a significant number of artifacts on display in British museums having been removed from their original owners during periods of colonisation, this episode tackles the intersection between cultural artefacts, and larger issues of justice such as racial inequality, systemic injustice, and property righ...

What do #TakeAKnee, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have in common? In this episode, we explored ongoing debates surrounding the place of rights in redressing structural injustice. We talked about the language of rights, as used by both social movements and institutions, as well as social media and legislation. What are the best practices to advance human rights in an imperfect world? All of this and...

Welcome to the 2nd season of Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast. With every episode, we’ll be exploring contemporary debates about politics and human rights with people who study them, and people who fight for them — both here in the UK and around the world. Taking on 3 thematic areas, this season focuses on 'protest', 'subjugation', and 'technologies of oppression/liberation'. Our first episo...

We can now take satellite pictures from the sky, get DNA samples on the scene and track moving networks of people through phones, laptops and other mobile technologies. With all this tech, human rights organisations should have a better idea than ever of the situation on the ground. But does this really matter, and can it really work? From using big data to predict instances of human rights abuse...

“If you are doing political art, you can say goodbye to safety. Art is not about safety.” Pussy Riot activist Maria Alyokhina discusses how she’s used art to protest against authoritarianism in Russia, for which she spent nearly two years in prison. In this episode, she speaks out against the human rights abuses against LGBT citizens in Chechnya. After Scott's interview with Maria, former Moscow T...

We sit down with world-renowned economist Dr Ha-Joon Chang, author of "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism", to explore economic rights, the welfare state, and neoliberalism in the age of Trump and Brexit. Does the state have an obligation to provide certain goods and services? Can we afford the welfare state? And does the free market even exist?

What is the status of LGBT+ rights in the world today? Who is best placed to lead and advance these movements? From questioning whether countries of the Global North should intervene in countries where LGBT+ rights are threatened, to assessing the legacies of colonialism on cultures of tolerance, we deconstruct the concept of ‘allyship’ in the fight for LGBT+ rights today. This week, we’re joined...

Is there a right to die, and if so, who has this right? A few countries, such as Switzerland, have legalized forms of assisted dying, but others, like the UK, have banned such practices. With the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the US Supreme Court, this topic has also sprung up again in America, as the only book Gorsuch has published makes an argument against assisted dying. This week's guest is St...

The International Criminal Court (ICC)was established in 2002 to prosecute individuals for committing genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. However, only Africans have been prosecuted by the court thus far, leading some African states to criticize the court for a perceived bias against Africans. This week, we're joined by Cambridge lecturer Dr Adam Branch, as well as Masters students...