Socio-Legal Hub Seminar – Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence

In this seminar, Karen Engle will discuss her recently published book, ‘Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence‘. Contemporary international human rights law increasingly obligates states to heighten their criminalization of certain human rights violations, including gendered, racialized, and homophobic violence. Engle’s book uses prison and police abolitionist thought to challenge this trend. It focuses on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), arguing that the Court’s reliance on punishment and policing threatens to undo earlier European approaches to criminal law and human rights that resonate with abolitionist thought. It also contends that the criminalization approach provides the Court with an alibi for not recognizing or attending to the deeply structural racialized, colonial, sexual, gendered, and homophobic violence in Europe, particularly but not only against Roma communities and Black and Muslim migrants. Encouraging human rights advocates and judges to take seriously prison and police abolition in Europe and elsewhere, the Element calls for the ECtHR to pave the way for an abolitionist-oriented turn among human rights courts.

Speaker: Professor Karen Engle is the Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law at the University of Texas and founder and co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.

Chair: Dr Nafay Choudhury