Auch dieses Jahr findet wieder der Kurs für Menschenrechte (31.8.-4.9.) in Dubrovnik statt. Bis zum 15. April können Vorschläge zum Thema „The Diversity of Human Rights: Human Rights between Morality, Law, and Politics“ eingereicht werden; alle Infos finden sich nach dem Klick.
Georg Lohmann is the founding figure of our course “The Diversity of Human Rights” and its
spiritus rector since almost twenty years. As the title he gave to the course already indicates,
Lohmann rejects any reductionist approach of human rights not only concerning their content
but also with regard to the different disciplinary perspectives we need to study them
appropriately. He is convinced that the different types or generations of human rights – civil,
political, social and cultural rights – also reflect their complex nature as morally justified,
politically interpreted and legally enforced claims of individuals.
With this year’s topic we directly address Lohmann’s central research topic and thus want to
honor our colleague and friend as a distinguished human rights scholar. Based on the
conviction that recognition in science and philosophy shall take the form of argumentative
exchange, we invite human rights scholars from different disciplines and schools of thought to
contribute to this conference and to present papers on the complex relations between morality,
1law, and politics. Welcome are contributions which either discuss Lohmann’s research
directly or take a different stance on the fundamental issues regarding our topic.
Examples of relevant questions could be: Is a naturalistic theory, according to which we have
human rights simply in virtue of being human, appropriate to capture the nature of human
rights? Or should we favor some political or practice-dependent conception instead? Are
human rights claims hold exclusively against states of state-like political institutions, or are
other agents also bound by human rights obligations? Is a state-centered approach of human
rights still the prevailing opinion in International Law? Is the constitutionalization of
international law still a realist utopia despite the recent backlash against globalization and
multilateral forms of cooperation? Do human rights necessarily include a right to democratic
governance? Can Habermas’ thesis of a co-originality of human rights and democracy be
defended against liberal and republican alternatives? Is there a way to reconcile the
universality of human rights with the particularity of rights to citizenship and of the specific
experiences that give rise to concrete human rights claims?
The organizers invite researchers as well as human rights activists coming from all fields and
disciplines, to send in abstracts (deadline: April 15, 2020, e-mail: arnd.pollmann@berlin.de or
bernd.ladwig@fu-berlin.de) that deal with some of the problems and tensions indicated above.