PIL Hub Seminar: Spatialising Human Rights

The PIL hub lunch-time seminar series aims to provide an opportunity to discuss and debate leading research on contemporary, theoretical and historical issues of international law.

Our next PIL Hub seminar will be held on 20th March, from 13.00 to 14.00 in the Moot Court Room.

We will have the opportunity to hear from Illan rua Wall.

In 2017 Jean Carmalt identified a glaring absence in the literature on human rights. Taking a number of key journals in geography over the previous 25 years, she pointed out that less than 0.015% of the published work in the field included human rights in its title or subtitle. While this was a crude metric, she observed, it helped to underline how reluctant geography as a discipline was, to engage with human rights. Her claim is surprising perhaps, because human geography in general (and legal geography in particular) seems fascinated by rights, territory, property, contestation, bodies and movement. But despite this, there is very little on the specificities of human rights. The work that does exist, tends to eschew critical analysis and instead set geographical tools to work in reporting and punishing human rights violations. Starting from this relative lack of engagement, the paper seeks to explore the critical potential of geography to think afresh about human rights. It begins from the right to assembly, and seeks out critical frameworks to overcome the shortcomings of the human right to protest.

Illan rua Wall is a Lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and the Galway Law School, and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Warwick. He is author of Law and Disorder (2021) and Human Rights and Constituent Power (2012), and one of the editors of The Critical Legal Pocketbook (2021), the blog criticallegalthinking.com and the journal Law & Critique. He works on human rights, protest and policing, critical legal theory and affect theory.

This event will be on a first-come-first-serve basis.