LAW30470 International Human Rights Law

Academic Year 2022/2023

This module involves the study of the promotion and protection of human rights under international law. It aims to provide students with a substantial grounding in the legal foundations of contemporary international human rights law (IHRL), with a particular emphasis on the International Bill of Rights and the UN human rights treaty system. The module is structured in three parts. The first part will introduce the institutional history of IHRL, its structure, sources, scope of application, as well as the nature and scope of human rights and corresponding state obligations. In the second part, we will explore the UN mechanisms that have been set up to review states' efforts to implement their international human rights obligations, including state reporting mechanisms, individual complaint mechanisms and inter-state peer-review mechanisms. In the third part, we focus on discussing selected substantive rights, covering both civil and political as well as socio-economic rights. Throughout all three parts, the module will incorporate the analysis of contemporary challenges to IHRL, such as, for example, its extraterritorial application, the emergence of powerful non-state actors, poverty and inequality, unprecedented private and state surveillance capabilities and the renewed rise of authoritarianism.