Latest blog articles

What does the retrial of genocide convict Augustin Ngirabatware mean for international criminal law and the victims of the 1994 genocide?

Expensive medicines are a ubiquitous challenge from which no government is immune. Excessive price hikes are an urgent human rights issue with serious ramifications for public health. One such example is that of Truvada (emtricitabine/tenofovir disoproxil fumarate), a breakthrough medicine that can...

UN treaty bodies are committees of independent experts in charge of monitoring state compliance with the major UN human rights treaties. Yet, how far are these committee members truly expert and independent from their home governments, considering that they are nominated and elected by states?

This post opines that the universalist/relativist debate on human rights is not as divisive as it initially seems – rather than to undermine universalism in its entirety, cultural relativism serves as a reminder to constantly re-evaluate our assumptions on human rights to promote inclusivity.

The debate around the universality of human rights is legitimate and long-lasting. While most people instantly think of cultural and religious relativity, invoking the sharia and indigenous traditions as obstacles to universality, new forms of questioning universality - and even human rights in...

Over the past decades, universality as the cornerstone of human rights has been constantly challenged by non-western societies. Legitimacy and western political hegemony intent are the underlying grounds. In the battle between universality and cultural relativism, which one should prevail?

Recent scholarship has suggested that cognitive biases shape the processing of any information about mass atrocities, essentially pushing individuals (at an unconscious level) to believe what they want to believe and reason about the ICTY and its work in a way that is most protective of their own...

The 70^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 25^th anniversary of the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights are a landmark in the development of human rights and a source of inspiration for academic research on new global human rights issues.

Seventy years to the day have passed since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. International human rights have since gained ground in theory, discourse, and practice. In this short post, I argue that for human rights to regain some of their traction, we should take care not to use...

As you may or may not know, Cyprus is a divided island. While the south of the island is governed by the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, the north is governed by the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus", an internationally unrecognized state.