The Rights' Future

LSE Literary Festival public discussion

Conor Gearty joins invited guests to initiate The Rights' Future a collaborative writing project aimed at the production of a book to be launched at LSE's literary festival early in 2011. Starting this evening with his RIGHTS' MANIFESTO, Gearty will release a series of weekly essays onto the web which will probe the history of human rights, address their present state in the world and map out some of the possible futures that await this morally important but highly contested phrase. Gearty has a particular view of his subject, believing human rights to be the only potentially radical and genuinely universal idea available to us in this post-socialist world of fear, money and lost souls. Too important to be left to lawyers but too subversive to be handed over to the politicians alone, human rights need the intellectuals, the workers and the streets if their model of a new kind of society has any chance of beginning to be built.

Each essay will be open to discussion and debate on the web and Gearty will adapt and improve his original thoughts through the engagement they generate. There will be an opportunity for alternative essays, votes on particular propositions and the development of rival points of view. Here is a chance not only to receive but to give, to speak as well as listen. Join the debate!

Costas Douzinas is Law professor and director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. His books include The End of Human Rights and Human Rights and Empire.

Conor Gearty is professor of human rights law at LSE and was for seven years the director of LSE's centre for the study of human rights. He has written many books on civil liberties and human rights, the next one being (with Virginia Mantouvalou) Debating Social Rights, to be published by Hart in November. He is also a Barrister at Matrix Chambers.

Francesca Klug is a professorial research fellow at the LSE and director of the Human Rights Futures Project. A former Director of the Civil Liberties Trust, Francesca was awarded an OBE for services to human rights and civil justice in the 2002 new year's honours list. Francesca is a frequent broadcaster and has written widely on human rights, including Values for a Godless Age: the story of the UK Bill of Rights (Penguin, 2000). She is currently writing a sequel to this book, to be published by Routledge.

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