The Wisconsin International Law Journal will host its annual symposium, this year titled Regional Human Rights Systems in Crisis, March 31, 2017.
Regional human rights systems have been heralded as one of the greatest innovations of the project of global governance. However, there are a host of urgent issues — of growing importance to social justice and human well-being — that pose fundamental challenges to the more developed regional systems, even as they make it harder for newer regional systems to develop. It is unclear, for example, how well these systems grapple with questions of economic inequality, climate change, migration crises and organized non-state violence. They are challenged as well by Brexit and other criticisms of globalization. In this Symposium, we explore how and whether regional rights systems can constructively engage in these challenging times. We include not just the highly developed systems of Europe and the Americas, but also the new and less judicialized systems of Asia and the Middle East. Taken together, the conference allows us to ask anew the question of what are human rights, and where do human rights inscribed at the regional level take us in the contemporary era.
