TRANSCRIPT

Source: [Louv2x] General Introduction

OLIVIER DE SCHUTTER: The course on International Human Rights is divided in eight

sections. And approximately each section shall require the same amount of work from you,
estimated to be between 8 and 10 hours of work online in order to watch the videos, to read the
materials, to complete the exercises that will allow you to go through the topic of international
human rights. I should, however, emphasize that the first section is perhaps the most difficult, the
most demanding. It is certainly the longest in terms of the materials covered. And of course, it
will introduce you to topics that, for many of you, are new, and concepts that you may not be
accustomed to using. But on the whole, the sections are relatively similar in the amount of work
that they require. And it is thus that they have been conceived.

What are these sections? Well, let me introduce, briefly, the roadmap of the course so that you
see what, in general, our itinerary shall be, and what are the different topics that we will address.

The first section is dedicated to the sources of human rights. Here we will try to understand
where human rights come from, how they have emerged in international law, how they have
developed, where to find them, and what the particular status of human rights is in the broader
area of international law, and trying to understand what is specific to human rights that – as you
may know – have first developed within the domestic legal systems at the national level, in
domestic national constitutions before they became part of international human rights. And this
hybrid nature of human rights, both constitutional in nature and international, following the
Second World War and the understanding that they should become part of the concerns of the
international community, is what makes this topic extremely important and interesting.

The second section, will discuss when Human Rights apply, to which situations they apply. For
example, may a State be held responsible for a violation committed in a part of the national
territory that the State does not control, for example, because a guerrilla movement has captured
that part of the State's territory? May a State be responsible for human rights violation that occurs
abroad, that perhaps to State may have been able to prevent, or in which the State may have
played a role?

We will also examine, in this section two, what happens when a state declares a state of
emergency. For example, because the State faces the threat of terrorist attacks, or because the
State is confronted with a natural disaster. What then happens to human rights? May a State
suspend the enjoyment of human rights during this time of crisis? May a State declare, for
example that, for some weeks, people may not demonstrate publicly or that suspects may be
detained without being presented to a judge immediately? That is what we will examine in
section two.

In section three, we will be looking at the conditions under which the rights of the individual
may be restricted by states. Of course, some rights, such as the right not to be subjected to torture
or the right to life may never be restricted. These are absolute guarantees that even if a state has
very good reasons to limit, the State is prohibited from infringing.

But most rights may actually be restricted, be subject to limitations. And that is done very
routinely. The State very routinely restricts the conditions under which people may express their
religious belief, conditions under which they may move across the territory, conditions under
which they may express themselves in newspapers. But of course, there are very strict conditions
that the State must comply with in order to justify such restrictions being imposed. And so in this
section of the course, in section three, we shall examine what those conditions are. And we will
do so through a number of examples.

Section four of the course will be dedicated to the – if you wish – opposite question. The
question of when the State must intervene in order to protect human rights. Indeed, it would not
be acceptable for the states simply to remain passive when rights are being violated by other
private individuals infringing on the rights of some individuals.

For example, if a child is molested within his or her family, the state must intervene to protect
that child's right to safety and to be protected from inhuman or degrading treatment. If a
corporation inflicts damages on communities, for example, by polluting the soils or the water, the
State, again, must not remain passive. The State must intervene in order to protect the rights of
that community.

So section four we'll be looking at when the State must intervene, under which conditions it may
intervene. It will also examine issues such as conflicting rights. If, for example, a journalist is
accused of violating the right to privacy of a celebrity, on which the journalistic publishes a paper
that is considered to be defamatory or to be based on information that was collected in violation
of the right to privacy. Well, the question is how to balance freedom of expression of the
journalist against the right to privacy of that celebrity. So we will examine that issue also in
section four of the course.

Section five of the course will be examining the extent to which State must invest in improving
the fulfillment of human rights. For human rights to be fully enjoyed, States must build schools.
They must build hospitals. They must provide access to medicine, to food in some cases, to the
population. And it is very controversial, the question, the extent to which the state must intervene
to fulfill human rights in that way is one that is very heavily contested. Indicators are used to
measure the progress of the State in this regard, to measure the speed at which the State ensures
the progressive realization of human rights, as we say, in our human rights jargon. And we will
examine how indicators are used, what they mean, what they try to measure exactly in this
section on the duty of the State to fulfill human rights.

Section six will be dedicated to the hugely important issue of discrimination. All human rights
instruments prohibit discrimination, protect equality of treatment, guarantee equality of treatment
to individuals. But the understanding they have of discrimination may be very different.

And indeed, discrimination occurs in a variety of ways, not all of which are prohibited in the
same way in the different systems we will examine. Issues that we will discuss in this section six
include profiling, for example, by the police trying to identify who may be suspect of preparing
terrorist activities; issues of stereotyping on grounds, for example, of ethnicity or gender; or the
very controversial issue of affirmative action benefiting certain groups that are underprivileged in
society, and that the State may wish to help overcome the barriers that they face for their full
social and professional integration. So all this is related to the prohibition of discrimination and
the promotion of equality of treatment, and will be the topic of section six.

Section seven, will be looking at the mechanisms which individuals should have access to at
domestic level in order to ensure that, when human rights are violated, they are protected. They
can obtain reparation for the damage inflicted or the violations that they have been victims of.
They may do so by filing actions before courts, or indeed, by calling upon non-judicial bodies
such as national human rights institutions, which, in some cases, have the possibility to receive
complaints by individuals to which they then may react and respond to. So section seven will be
dedicated to examining what procedures States should put in place in order to effectively protect
individuals from human rights violations at the domestic level.

Finally, section eight will be dedicated to the mechanisms of human rights protection that have
been established at the international level. There we will examine, for example, what the Human
Rights Council has been doing. The Human Rights Council is a 47-members body within the UN,
in which governments discuss human rights issues. And the Human Rights Council has a very
important role in monitoring compliance with human rights of the member states of the United
Nations.

Similarly, under the various international treaties, courts have been established. Expert bodies
have been established. For example, the UN has nine human rights treaties and associated treaty
bodies that are expert groups, that receive reports from states, that receive communications from
individuals that these expert bodies may then process. And we will examine, in section eight,
how these mechanisms function. And I will hope to provide you some insights into how this has
developed over time.

That is our program. That is our roadmap. As you can see, it's a very important menu.

At the same time, it is not providing you with the full range of doctrines that have developed in
human rights law. And we will certainly not study all the rules of human rights. That would be
overwhelming, and it would not be very useful. Human rights change all the time. What is
important is that you understand the basic grammar of human rights, so that you can gradually
update your knowledge, update your understanding as new developments occur.

My hope is, in this course, to provide you with the tools, with the vocabulary, with the concepts
that will allow you to learn by yourself, and to remain informed, and to seek information in the
areas that you wish to deepen for your practice in human rights. And so that is what the eight
sections seek to achieve, and the topics that we will try to cover. I look forward to working with
you. Thank you.