Northeastern Law’s Center for Global Law and Justice 2024 Speaker Series, Issues in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law
Featuring:
Karen Engle
Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair, Professor of Law, Founder and Co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapport Center for Human Rights and Justice, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Abstract:
Contemporary international human rights law increasingly obligates states to heighten their criminalization of certain human rights violations, including gendered, racialized and homophobic violence. This book uses a prison and police abolitionist lens to challenge this trend. It focuses on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), arguing that the Court’s reliance on criminalization threatens to undo earlier European approaches to penality 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. Challenging human rights advocates and judges to take seriously prison and police abolition in Europe and elsewhere, the book (re)introduces the insights of European penal abolitionists from the 1970s, considering them alongside more recent U.S. abolitionist activism and thought that attends more explicitly to racialized and gendered violence. It calls for the ECtHR to bolster the penal minimalism found in some of its caselaw and pave the way for an anti-carceral turn among human rights courts
Northeastern Respondent:
Daniel Medwed
University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice
Questions?
Please contact Professor Zinaida Miller at z.miller@northeastern.edu.
The lecture series is open to the Northeastern University community and the general public.
Oct 10, 2024
2:50 pm to 4:45 pm