 and welcome to SOAS, for the, how many of you are here from somewhere other than SOAS? I'm quite curious actually. Wow, that's phenomenal. Like, how many of you are, no, I won't ask the strike question. We're not gonna talk about the strike. So on the eve of the strike, it's wonderful to have Catherine here. It would be wonderful to have Catherine here at any point in any academic year and we've tried to get Catherine, sick to come visit us at SOAS and she's been very graceful about accepting the invitation with a bit of a deferral because she's been very busy always finishing yet another book. And so I was tremendously pleased when she turned to me at the last meeting in San Francisco of the American Political Science Association and said, actually, now's the time and we all sort of jumped up and down, yes, finally. So it is a real honor to have a Catherine sicking turn up to London. She's been to London many times but have come to SOAS. It's an important conversation. I was saying to Catherine earlier today that I got many lovely notes from various academics scholars and obviously students here today saying how wonderful it is to have Catherine come because as we all know and we're very proud of our image as a very critical university but we're also a university that is the best, represents the best of academia and that we really do believe in a very spirited, robust debate and so it's very special to have people come who have been so committed to the field of human rights scholarship, so committed to human rights and bringing a very different perspective than sometimes I think we hear as much of at SOAS than perhaps people do in other parts, in other universities. So it is a real honor. Tonight's talk is hosted by the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy and also the Center on Conflict Rights and Justice which is in the Politics Department here at SOAS. It's part of the International Relations Speaker Series. We reserve this series for people who have made a very important contribution both to the academy, to scholarship at the highest levels and also for people whose work has really had an impact far beyond the academy and that's clearly the case with Catherine's work. Her work is something that's taken very seriously by public policy makers, by human rights advocates, all of whom know her personally but have followed her work and continue to follow her work very actively. It's interesting that we're here, I think, on the eve of the launch of Amnesty International's Human Rights Report, I believe, and Bargood until tomorrow morning and we're here for a talk by Catherine on her most recent book, Evidence for Hope, Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century. But first let me just say a few brief words about Catherine. She's a kind of scholar that I could give a very long introduction to but I won't because you'll be more interested to hear from her than from me. She spent 25 years at the University of Minnesota and she really built the human rights program there with a number of colleagues but really was at the forefront of that and it continues to thrive. I think that's a tremendous asset for Minnesota which has a robust human rights community but obviously she could have gone many places and she chose to stay. She's now at Harvard as the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy and the Carol K. Fortsheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. There aren't, I didn't think I've ever introduced somebody who has two named chairs, so well done Catherine. That's pretty terrific. She's written multiple books that have had a very significant impact. I think it's fair to say that she's created really the study of human rights in the field of political science and international relations. She's been probably one of the very few people who've really shaped the study more than any other. She's been studying human rights for a very long time, certainly long before it was popular to do so and she began studying human rights in a period when people thought, why in the world was she studying human rights? So she's gone through a number of real world changes and those changes and those challenges and those promises and potentials I think are very much reflected in her scholarship. Let me just mention a couple of her books, many of her books have won prizes, but let me mention a couple. One is the book that she wrote with Margaret Keck, Activists Beyond Borders, Advocacy Networks and International Politics in 1998. If you've studied human rights, you've not only read it, you've cited it, but it really brought to the forefront of the study of human rights, the role of non-state actors, of civil society actors working across borders to really put pressure on local governments that were repressing their people and human rights activism and civil society in a variety of ways and she really, they in that book got very granular about the people, the activists, the networks, the movements and the mechanisms and strategies and they articulated not only the stories and the people, but they really gave it a framework for all of us who wanted to study these movements to give some theory and give some concept to it and really bring it to the fore of our thinking and our work. Not only when we were supportive of the claims, but also when we were critical, so it's been very important for anybody who really studies human rights in the academy, but it's also had a very big impact beyond. Then she's in many other books, but I'll mention two others, The Justice Cascade, which came out in 2012 and won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, which discussed the origins and effects of human rights trials. I had the pleasure of being on many panels with Catherine on this particular debate, which I enjoyed and learned from a great deal and it represented another phase in her scholarship where she not only did what she does so well, which is deep qualitative work, talking to activists, theorizing, but also added a new dimension, which was a lot of quantitative work, which shows a certain kind of boldness for a scholar to cross over those methodological divides and engage with them very, very seriously. And then the power of human rights and many years later, I think 15 years later, 13 years later, the persistent power of human rights, which she wrote with Thomas Risa and Thomas Rope, and they really, once again, tried to theorize and think about the challenges and the opportunities and the potentials of human rights mobilization and the construction of norms. And then, and this most recent book, but there's much more to say. I think it goes without saying that this is a person, an individual who's tremendously committed, passionate about her work and has really shaped the field and that we are very lucky to have you here tonight. So thank you, Catherine, and we'll turn it over to you. Well, first, thank you very much to Leslie for that gracious introduction. And it is a real pleasure for me to be speaking for the first time at SOAS and to have this really amazing audience. So I'm gonna make sure that I leave time for us to have time for questions and comments and discussion. I'm gonna ask Leslie to try to give me sort of the five minute sign at about a half an hour and we'll try to wrap up then. And make sure I know how to. So as Leslie said, this is about my new book. The new book has two main parts and they're related but quite different. The first part is about legitimacy of human rights and diverse struggles. And the second part is about the effectiveness of human rights law, institutions and movements. I wrote this book explicitly to respond to a series of debates in the field that were actually very critical of the legitimacy and effectiveness of human rights, very skeptical, and I felt that as someone who's been working on human rights much of my career that it made sense for me to try to do more of an overview book of much that I've learned over my career. And so, but I spoke yesterday at the International Relations Group at LSE. I talked to them about the second half of the book, the effectiveness of human rights and I told them I was gonna come to SOAS today and I was gonna speak about the first half of the book which has to do about this legitimacy question and specifically about the issue of the origin of human rights. There's a, as you know, a very common argument that human rights has its origin in the United States and Western Europe and has often been imposed unwillingly on the global south. Again, I don't need to remind you or you all know this argument. My colleague at Harvard, David Kennedy has made it in calls of the tainted origins argument. Your professor here, Stephen Hopkud in his recent book, The End Times of Human Rights has argued as now the end times of human rights because human rights came from Western Europe and the United States with the decline of Western Europe and the United States that we would expect the end time. And so again, this is an argument, perhaps not about the origins but certainly about the globalization of human rights arguing that it has been a byproduct of American power and money, okay? So I today will, first I wanna clarify that what I'm talking about is the international, the origins of the international protection of human rights, not the origins of the national protection of human rights. So what do I mean by that? The notion that your government should protect your rights, national protection is a very old idea. It indeed goes back to the French Revolution, the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, the American Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, okay? So, but what I'm talking about is the idea of the international protection of rights. Should your government not only not be protecting your rights but actually be the main repressor of your rights? Before the mid-20th century, you had nowhere to go for redress, okay? And so this notion of the international protection of human rights, the notion that there should be international law, international institutions, mechanisms that could allow you to make human rights claims outside the state is a much newer idea it dates to the 20th century, especially post-World War II. And so the argument I'm gonna make is about the origins of this international protection of human rights. And my definition simply includes a very broad range of rights that are in the Universal Declaration and subsequent human rights law. Okay, so the talk today has not only deeply historical, but it also has important theoretical implications for those of us interested in international relations theory. Okay, so I've long theorized the role of norms and social movements in international politics. I have long been interested in questions of agency, okay? And so this argument about the origins is very important for notions about agency. Who can have agency for the origins and the diffusion of norms? And especially, how much can the global south have agency in some of these debates? And then that in turn relates to, even for me, a deeper theoretical question, not just for IR, but for social sciences more generally, and that is if certain norms or ideas grow to have great influence, as human rights has grown to have great influence over time, is there anything about the intrinsic characteristics of those ideas or those norms? In other words, about their content. Does the content of ideas influence its reception? And unless, you know, the related issues, of course, because unless we believe that there's a possibility of agency from actors who may not be classically powerful in terms of state power or wealth, it's hard to, we may be arguing that the content of ideas doesn't matter, only the power of the carrier of the ideas. So it's been, my first book, literally the first page of the first book said, it is a mystery to me why scholars who devote their entire life to ideas grant this content of ideas so little power in terms of their explanations for change in the world. And that mystery continues to this day. I'm still mystified by the fact that we're not able to make arguments about the power of ideas themselves, only about their carriers. So, okay. So these, this is the 70th anniversary in December, 2018, will be the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights. Okay, and the dominant narrative, the dominant narrative of the UDHR, begins like this, Eleanor Roosevelt iconic photo holding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you're French, or maybe more in Europe, you also get Rene Cassin, who is the father of human rights, okay. And the French government and the US government have built statues of Eleanor Roosevelt and Rene Cassin in Geneva to stress their role as perhaps the mother and father of human rights. Now that dominant narrative is not so much wrong as it is radically incomplete, radically incomplete. And because there were really five people who were, perhaps six if we include John Humphries, who were the main drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And we don't hear as much from them, we don't hear about Edan Santa Cruz, the Chilean diplomat, who was really with John Humphry, was one of the main people responsible for having economic and social rights included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We don't hear as much about Dr. Charles Malick, who was Lebanon's first ambassador to the US and the UN, and who was very involved in the many parts of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights. But among other things, he was the one who fought off the Latin Americans who wanted to put duties, the individual duties that individuals had two states in the Articles I and II of the Universal Declaration. He said, just as we are declaring the human rights of individuals for the first time, you come to us with duties, right? And we don't hear very much about PC Chang, as he was called, the Chinese diplomat and the vice chair of the UN Human Rights Commission. And again, Chang played multiple roles, but I was most struck, something I learned recently, it is to Chang that we owe the fact that the Universal Declaration makes no mention of God or nature, in other words, as the foundations of human rights. So in other words, those kind of classic, Western notions of the foundations of human rights, debates over the foundations, God and nature, nature being natural rights, do not appear in the Universal Declaration because Chang pointed out this was a universal document and that those notions of foundation certainly didn't correspond to his understanding of the foundations of rights. We don't hear about people like Bertha Lutz, Brazilian diplomat, here's present at the San Francisco Conference where the UN Charter is drafted and the person responsible for making sure that the UN Charter has an article guaranteeing rights of women in the United Nations. In this, she was not supported by the, there were six women in San Francisco, okay? Three from Latin America and in this, she was supported by her Latin American colleagues, she was not supported by the delegate, the woman delegate from UK or the United States. This is Hansa Mehta, she's an Indian writer, diplomat and independence, independence fighter and she's the person who made sure the Universal Declaration of Human Rights didn't use the formulation of all men. She said that needed to say human, all humans, not all men. Eleanor Roosevelt disagreed. She said it's generally understood in English that all men mean all people and Mehta held a ground and said actually there are many places in the world where all men would be interpreted as meaning only men and so we owe that language to Mehta. Okay, but the story is deeper than this so you're just gonna bear with me and Les is gonna keep the time because I'm gonna go into some deeper history which is who first mentioned and in writing the idea that there should be international protection of human rights. It's a big debate in the field, I may have some historians present who wanna debate this with me. There's good evidence, the first mention was by Alejandro Alvarez, Chilean jurist in 1917 to a meeting held in Havana, Cuba. There is a very interesting remark of the time written by one of his contemporaries that said and here I'm quoting, he said Alvarez's initiative attracted the attention of European scholars resulting in a session in 1921 of the European Institute of International Law where Professor de la Pradelle proposed and the Institute approved a draft declaration of rights that was without doubt broader and more precise than the articles proposed by Alvarez. Now note the order here. A Latin American jurist proposes a novel idea, the international protection of human rights. It attracts attention of Europeans who elaborate it further. This is not the kind of order we hear about in some of these arguments about international protection of human rights being imposed by the global north on the global south. What's going on? Alvarez is part already in 1917 of a transnational judicial network within which at least Europeans and Latin Americans were participating actively. Ideas were circulating and some jurists like Alvarez, also some of his colleagues that came somewhat earlier like Carlos Calvo, Luis Maria Drago were elaborating doctrines, like the Calvo doctrine or the Drago doctrine that would later be also taken up as a part of international law. So these jurists were part of networks, ideas were circling the networks and sometimes those ideas came out of scholars in this case in Latin America. But despite the fact that we hear of this in 1917, it's elaborate in 1921, it's not until during and after World War II that the international protection of human rights really takes off. Largely scholars have argued for reasons they have to do with the atrocities of World War II showing the incredible moral and ethical limits of the national protection of human rights. So all of a sudden the need for an international protection becomes very real. And so it's not until the San Francisco Conference, not until the UN Charter that we see states incorporating the notion of international protection of human rights in international law. And once again, the Dumbarton Oaks meeting was where the big four meet to draft the first draft of the UN Charter. At that meeting there's one mention of human rights. Roosevelt does include one mention. The Chinese delegate you see here proposed an article, an anti-discrimination article because of course his citizens, Chinese were facing so much prejudice when they traveled abroad and the remaining big three wouldn't even accept the anti-discrimination proposal. So it goes to San Francisco itself and the small powers and especially Latin American states are advocates for incorporating human rights much more deeply and profoundly in the UN Charter. There were 50 states at San Francisco, 20 of those states were Latin American. I think it's 36 were from what we now today would call, not 32, from what we now today would call the global south. Okay, but 20 was a big voting block out of 50 for the Latin Americans. They were mainly democratic at the time and were very interested in including economic development issues and including human rights. So the Latin Americans worked together with other small states, New Zealand, Australia and with NGOs that were present in San Francisco succeeded in lobbying the US government and other governments to agree to do more about human rights including mandate the creation of a human rights commission and the US eventually came around. But again, a quite different story than we hear. This is the story of lots of arms twisting to get a couple of the great powers on board with having human rights part of the Charter. And there were eventually seven points in the Charter where human rights is mentioned. All subsequent UN work on human rights relates to those articles of the Charter. Now this is the part I've spent some research on and this is the earliest intergovernmental declarations of human rights. The earliest one was not the universal declaration. It was the American declaration of rights and duties of man. In other words, it should be called the inter-American or the Latin American. Again, it was written by these 20 Latin American states and the US, mainly by the 20 Latin American states. The US did not have a big role. It came on April 1948, eight months before the universal declaration. It included rights, all of which went in to eventually into the universal declaration. The entire draft of the American declaration was done in March 1946 before the first meeting of the committee that would draft the universal declaration. But you never hear this. Even in Latin America, people don't know about the American declaration. And so here it's the year of the 70th anniversary of the universal declaration. Wait in here how much anyone has to say about the American declaration. A group of us are trying to persuade the OAS right now. Would they please, please celebrate in April the anniversary of the American declaration to again make clear contributions that the American declaration made to the world of human rights. Okay, so, but Latin America, then after 1948, and this incredible protagonism began to lose its ability to advocate human rights. And it lost its ability because every country that was, all those 20 countries that were at Bogota and in San Francisco experienced a military coup between 1945 and 19, well, I guess the last of those coups was 73, okay. And often those coups with the support of the United States during the Cold War. And so US policy during the Cold War sort of eliminated the coalition of Democratic leaders, diplomats and jurists who advocated for human rights and put in their place authoritarian anti-communist leaders who repressed the rights of their citizens. And so it tends to be like one reason Latin Americans have forgotten this history is because those dictatorships for reasons of their own erased the history of their contributions. So we have things in Brazil, for example, proposes the first, proposes in 1948 in Bogota there should be an inter-American court of human rights. This is the first proposal for regional court of human rights, okay. It is tabled and then it dies in committee. But so Latin America has to wait 20 years to see a new proposal for a court. Meanwhile, as you know here, the Europeans get busy between 1950 and 53. They draft the European convention and by 53 the new, the first and new human rights commission, regional human rights commission begins to exist here in Europe. The European commission, the European court of human rights. But just as the Latin Americans are kind of pulling out of this struggle for human rights, we see a very interesting phenomena which is that other countries which are rapidly, we have rapid decolonization beginning to happen this period and that other countries are stepping up. So the Madame Penley who is the first woman president of the UN General Assembly and who was an early Indian delegate to the UN. She was the sister of Nero. She very influential political figure at home and abroad. Even before she was president of the UN General Assembly she really generates the first big debate in the UN General Assembly about human rights and sovereignty and it's over the issue of apartheid in South Africa and partly over the mistreatment of, of course, Indians in South Africa. But she argues and carries the doubt for many that Dr. Nassauventi does not prohibit countries from talking about the internal human rights practices of other countries such as South Africa. And so there's a, there's a process of decolonization, the anti-apartheid campaign and the CERD which is a convention against all forms of racial discrimination in which there's intense protagonism by the newly decolonized states of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. And I, here I'm really drawing not on my own research but on, on recent historiography by people like Stephen Jensen's a terrific book The Make of International Human Rights the 1960s, decolonization, the reconstruction of global values, another book by Roland Burke and there are a few others as well that make this case using detailed archival research from the UN and from national archives. And the point, the main point is decolonization was about sovereignty and about human rights. And here, contrary to Samuel Moyn who some of you will know, Samuel Moyn's book The Last Utopia, he claims decolonization was about sovereignty, not about human rights, okay. And these individuals using much more careful historiography, historical research really argue persuasively that decolonization was about both human rights and sovereignty. So the first transnational activist grassroots campaign for human rights in the 20th century after the new UN was set up was the anti-partite campaign. Once again, starting with the ANC which incorporates human rights issues in some of their earliest manifestos, the youth manifestos, early as 1943. The anti-partite campaign is very much embraced by these newly decolonized states who make it their own and who fight to take it up at the UN. And so here we see something that is characteristic I'm gonna argue during this period that grassroots campaigns and organizations struggle to create international rights law and to create international human rights institutions. And this is one place where Stephen Hoffman and I have a disagreement. Stephen has argued that there's human rights with a little h and a little r which are these grassroots groups and that we have international institutions which are capital H, capital R and they're the problem. And really there isn't a much connection between these two spheres. I'm gonna argue that certainly the historical periods that I'm looking at which would be this period 60s, 70s, 80s, there was intense connection between grassroots groups and international institutions and national law. And a great example that Jensen goes into detail about is this convention on all forms of racial discrimination. So it's only the second human rights convention. So you have the genocide convention, then you have CERD, okay? It's seven years before the covenants enter into force, okay? And it moved very quickly through the UN due to this protagonist from these newly decolonized states. And the CERD convention, states were very worried there would be no enforcement. And so they create these new states and for example, not just African states but like Jamaica was very involved. And so Caribbean states, African states, some Asian states, they wanted enforcement so they innovated mechanisms, something called a treaty body. Okay, now treaty bodies is like old hat. Everyone, but when CERD was created there was no such thing as a treaty body. And they were coming up with an idea of how they could enforce this law and they created the first committee for CERD and they created the first right to individual petition in a human rights treaty. Once those, that petition and treaty body were in the CERD treaty, they were then inserted into all subsequent human rights treaties, right? Either within the body of the treaty or within protocols, okay? So you have this really innovation in human rights enforcement going on through CERD that then sets a model for everything that comes afterwards. Okay, so the question, okay, the argument I'm making is that there was very important agency from the global south in the origins and the globalization of the human rights regime and that that agency has largely been erased, okay? And it's been erased by states and it's been erased sometimes by scholars. And so I wanna talk a little about that as I end. So why do I say erased? Well, first I go and give this talk around Latin America and most of the people I talk to are not familiar with the history I tell. So it's just speaking in universities in Brazil and Argentina and Uruguay and in Colombia, actually Colombia is the one place, the one place where people were familiar with this history. People were not familiar. Little people go to me, I had no idea about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, okay? I mean, excuse me, about the American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man. Or recently people are starting to know there's a wonderful virtual library, I know, Museo Virtual, a virtual museum for about the lots in Brazil right now. But it's very recent kind of coming to grips with their own history. But it's even worse today, Leslie and I were talking on the radio and I told a story. I was teaching a group of human rights students in Budapest and one person came from Lebanon. She was a scholar of human rights from Lebanon and I gave this talk and I had my slide of Charles Malik up and saying he was one of the five most important people writing the Universal Declaration. And she said, she goes, I live on Charles Malik Boulevard. But I never knew who he was, okay? And so there is some kind of, there is some kind of eraser going on about this. So much so that, for example, I wrote a whole article just on Argentine protagonism around transitional justice issues. Because I started hearing people say, oh, transitional justice, that comes from the Center for Transitional Justice in New York and they have a cookie cutter and they go and cookie cut all over the world. And I like to, you know, the truth is transitional justice arrived late to New York because it starts in Argentina over the first truce commission, right? It starts in South Africa with a very innovative truce commission. But basically Argentina, every single one of the things we'd consider the toolbox of transitional justice was tried out first by the Argentines before the Center for Transitional Justice ever existed in New York City, okay? So if the, you know, so why? Why the erasure? And I think there's two different arguments. One is why would states erase this, okay? And the authoritarian, from Latin America, I don't know how well this is, the rest of the world, the authoritarian states in Latin America had strong interest to erase the history of Latin American protagonism for human rights, okay? So these were regimes that were imprisoning, torturing, censoring, disappearing their opponents, right? And they were being criticized at the time, eventually by Jimmy Carter and by some parts of the US Congress. And so it was much more convenient for them to say, Jimmy Carter, this is US imperialism instead of saying, or even remembering that Latin American delegates had drafted the American, the first intergovernmental declaration of rights and duties, okay? I believe that some of this state efforts at erasure are still underway, okay, in many parts of the world because it's inconvenient for especially repressive states to remind their citizens of their historical protagonism for human rights. But I, you know, there's another issue of why do scholars erase this history? And I think that, I think that, sometimes it's just, it's, you know, difficult to do some of this research in if you're gonna use archives in the developing world. So I've been to, you know, a handful of archives, you know, the ones in Montevideo, for example, you know, we're just really dusty, really poorly organized, really incomplete, you know, people are bringing me out the boxes and it just includes the most kind of messy set of things, some of which are useful. Sometimes archives are closed, the Brazilian archives have been closed for years, I don't know why. So it's difficult to do the research. I think that there, secondly, are strong claims that some of these individuals that I've mentioned, for example, lack authenticity as representatives of the global south. So someone like Charles Malick, for example, who was a Maronite Christian at a time when Lebanon was still a Christian majority country, but no longer is, and who got a PhD at Harvard University, was seen as not, that somehow his education at Harvard had somehow made him unable to be seen as a representative of his own country, of his own region, okay? Or, same thing with PC Chang, PC Chang was a nationalist from the nationalist government before the Chinese Revolution. He was pushed out of his job in a university by the Japanese, during the Japanese invasion and came and studied at Columbia University. So once again, somehow his international studies make him suspect for not being representative. So even though when you see the actual contributions these individuals made to the Universal Declaration or to human rights law, you see that they're representing issues that are genuine concern to their societies. For example, Malick was very important for the quite controversial part of the Universal Declaration that says you have a right to religion and you have a right to change your religion. He didn't learn that one at Harvard. He learned that one because of the strife that was going on in Lebanon around this issue of whether people could have a right to their religion and a right to change their religion, okay? But the point I wanna make is Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't authentically American either, right? Eleanor Roosevelt lived at a time when racial and gender discrimination was completely the norm in US society, right? She was an advocate for women's rights. She was an advocate for civil rights, okay? So we are happy to embrace her today, but we recognize that she was not an authentic representative of American culture, all too evident even today after the Trump election, okay? So this seems to be a double standard of what makes you authentic or not, and I think we need to re-examine that double standard. And particularly, those of you, okay, I've got a room full of people, some of whom are studying abroad, right? And you can tell me, do you think that somehow you studying at SOAS or in London has made you a less of an authentic representative of your society? So why is this so important? Why is it so important to me that I dedicated half of my book to this? I believe that the origins of human rights is a clear example of normed protagonism, some normed protagonism from the global south. Okay, there's some episodes. There's other episodes where the story is different. I'm sharing with you episodes where there's strong normed protagonism of the global south. And it suggests the possibility of other norms and law that can also come from unexpected places with oppressed groups or with groups that certainly do not have the traditional forms of power that we look at in international relations, right? These are not wealthy. These not come from states with military power. They may not even come from places with soft power. Who knows that Jamaica could have led the campaign for the third? So if these norms then take off, sometimes succeed as the anti-apartheid struggle did as struggles for economic and social rights have, it suggests that these ideas sometimes succeed because of their legitimacy and their persuasiveness of the content and because of some kind of integrity that their protagonists have and not only as a result of the power of their carriers. So I would like to end there, open it for discussion. I should tell you that I'm happy to discuss either part of the book and I brought with me a bunch of slides that I can talk about the effectiveness issue as well if you'd like. So thank you and please stay and share with me your comments and questions. Share with us, I should have said share with us. Yes, because Leslie and I are gonna talk too. We'll let you take the four seats because we'll wear your mic as well. The first question, but I'm gonna pose a relatively brief question. I love it when people start bursting out in small group activities surrounding debates about human rights, you know you're as I was. I think it was a very so as friendly talk actually, which is, it was fantastic. Not what we always expect from our American colleagues coming to see us. But I wanna ask the first question and then we'll put it out to the audience. When you ask your question, please keep it pretty brief because I think there will be a lot of questions. Start with who you are and what you're affiliated with, right? Why you're here. And then state your question. My question is, I really appreciated that you got at the end because I was gonna ask you sort of what's at stake in the origins question. And so I wanna ask that question but I wanna ask it in a particular way. Or perhaps it's a what's at risk with the origins question. So when you said, you know, a lot of people say transitional justice was created by the ICTY, the International Center for Transitional Justice, which is probably one of the biggest NGOs now for transitional justice that's based out of New York but is global and Catherine's absolutely right. That's not where transitional justice started and apart from Argentina and the other cases that she looks at in her Justice Cascade book, the Irish have a claim on this, lots of people do, right? But what has happened arguably, and I'm sure that there may well be people here from, we used to get a lot of ICTJ people they used to have a London based person who came often to sell us. But there is a sense that there has been a standard of even if the origins are in other parts of the globe that once it becomes internationalized it does become a bit cookie cutter. And so one example that I would use of where this becomes a little bit perhaps dangerous. Maybe that's an unfair word but when Ken Roth talks about why it is that that it's not an appropriate claim to say well the international criminal court in its first decade all of its investigations were in Africa and so therefore it's anti-Africa and Ken Roth wrote in the New York Review of Books and said that's not a fair allegation because actually 34 African states, now 33 are members of the ICC, they were right there at the front, they voluntarily signed up, they were there at the origins. And so therefore it's not okay to say that it's an anti-African court. So I guess the question is, the origin story is tremendously important and I think we all value it especially hearing that. But then it becomes something else when it becomes internationalized frequently and then it comes back to the originators in a form that wasn't really necessarily the form that was intended. And that's where I think people see the negative perhaps effects of the so-called west or the international owning and standardizing human rights. So it's sort of a comment but a question, what more is at stake in the story of origins or what's at risk? What's the risk of the origins just at some level becoming lost in the story of internationalization and standardization? Yeah. So when I wrote the book, I did yet another round of interviews with activists which I always do for most of my work. And I have always been very aware of asymmetries within a transcendental advocacy networks. And the people always remind me that those asymmetries within networks continue to exist and be strong. And so I quote my colleague César Rodríguez Caravito of the Justicia in Los Andes Law School in Colombia and saying that human rights watch seems incapable of ever co-authoring in our report. He said academics, we know how to co-author, it's not easy but we figure it out, right? How to give credit where credit is due and human rights watch can't somehow do that and that creates this asymmetry because there's a sense of kind of mining information out of the south and not giving appropriate credit where it's due. And so there's a lot and I mentioned that in the book and in fact I spoke to people human rights watch last week and I admire if human rights watch think they do great work but at one point I said yes, you need to know that groups in the global south do feel this way about these asymmetries and about this sense that they're being kind of a source of information but not a partner and not working in solidarity. So the origin story is important because knowing some of these origin stories I think is empowering and if it's empowering it gives a sense you might have more leverage than you think because I think sometimes there's a belief that groups may think all the money is tied up with these big organizations unless we follow the line we won't have any money, we won't be able to do any work. But some of these origin stories I'm telling they're diffusion and spread, they're globalization stories of human rights suggest that these groups have more power than they might think and have been able to reshape the human rights law and institutions over time and that story could be empowering to say and this can continue today and you can put your foot down and demand certain things. And nowadays in fact there is a new trend and you've seen it too among foundations but also among academics which is to sort of see and among NGOs, Amnesty International is decentralized to the global south. Funding is increasingly flowing to groups that are based in the global south. Right. And so I think that the asymmetries can be partly mitigated by an understanding of history. Fantastic. Okay, to the audience, questions, a range of questions right here in the front row. Thank you. I'm Esther, I'm on the MSc, International Politics. I'm interested in the authenticity of the initial people at the table from global south states because you mentioned maybe they weren't authentic representatives of their states. I mentioned they were perceived that scholars have often perceived them as not authentic and then has dismissed their participation as evidence of global self-involvement. Okay, okay, well that clears that up. Thank you. Very good. And clarification points, very interesting. The mic's important because we're recording so thank you for using the mics as you ask your questions. Okay, right back here. Hi, thanks for that. To you, what do you think about the current state of global south country's contributions to the human rights debate and particularly thinking about, for example, Brazil's contribution to responsibility to protect and also China, I know they're both drafted documents kind of weighing in on the implementation of that. So I wondered if you thought this is kind of continuation of that historical period that you mentioned. And if you could tell us who you are. Oh, I'm Rachel. I'm on the Global Politics Program at LSE. Excuse me, pardon. Yes, I do think that there is examples today and in fact I'm working on a, trying to organize a group to do a volume on Brazilian foreign policy and human rights. And we will not only use the example of responsibility while protecting though I think that's a good example. But for also Brazil's advocacy for LGBT rights in the Human Rights Council. So Brazil was the first country that brought a resolution forward to the council on LGBT rights. They lost, but they did very serious lobbying around it and they advised Brazilian diplomats in capitals to lobby the government in the capital to get a vote in Geneva for and so they lost but they got close and then South Africa came back a few years later with Brazilian support and they secured the first resolution that would pass in the Human Rights Council. So that would be another example. Or Brazil has had various programs around this issue of conditional cash transfers as a poverty reduction program and under the Lula government in particular Brazil had quite success with reducing poverty and beginning to bring down some inequality in Brazil, one of the most unequal countries. And so they've also diffused, worked on really diffusing that model to other countries especially in the developing world. But Brazil's not the only example. There are others as well. And but I sort of want, there's really missing research in this area and I kind of want to make it appeal to some of the students here who are trying to choose master's thesis topics and things that this is an understudied area because some of these initiatives don't always appear in mainstream literature. So you really do have to do kind of field work and interviews to find this out. But I just want to encourage people to seek out some of this and write up some of these cases because I think they're, I think you would get published, right? One of my colleagues at the Kennedy School published this case on the, Brazil and the LGBT rights. You got it in the global governance like that because no one knew, really no one knew. So I know a few people in the audience are going to be happy to hear that. All right, back here in the back, actually here in the yellow and then we'll go to the right. Could you say who you are? Hello, yeah. First of all, thank you for the presentation. I'm Nico, well, Nicola from SOAS. So I want to ask, human rights, their expansion and their respect or what I would call it alleged respect have gone end in end with periods of democratic expansion, right? In an age of democratic recession, so with the rise of populism, neo-fascist rhetoric and discourse taking hold, how can you see it as hopeful as the title of the book says? Right. Notice the book says evidence for hope, okay? And that was very explicit. I was just joking with people. Yesterday I said, when I told my feminist colleagues at the Kennedy School I was gonna write a book with hope in the title. She said, you can't write a book with hope in the title. Women can't write books with hope in the title. I said, Albert Hirschman wrote a book with hope in the title. She said, he's an economist. He's a man. He can do it. So I did explicitly, despite that challenge, decided to write a book with hope in the title. Why? Why? Because first, all human rights victories came as a result of struggle. Governments never hand citizens, and I think I can say that almost virtually, never hand citizens their rights on a silver platter. You get them because you demand them and you struggle for them, often over a very long time, okay? So the anti-partheid campaign, which I mentioned, was a many decades long campaign to secure its victories, okay? So the first thing is the importance of change takes a long time, and it occurs over many decades. If people feel hopeless, they might feel as though what's the use of struggling? And so what's at stake is literally how to infuse some hope in a movement today that is facing very serious challenges, the Trump administration in the United States, for example, and the rise of new authoritarians here in Europe and elsewhere, okay? So I argued in the second half of the book that while the current situation is very alarming in many ways, if we look at long trends over time on many things that could be measures for human rights, I've produced a lot of data, human rights data and economic data, there've been quite dramatic progress over time for a whole series of rights. Being a woman, I can tell you that when I went to Columbia University, as a graduate student, there were no women faculty, right? So even in our lifetime, what we've seen of women in academia, not just here but everywhere in the world, okay? But also advances with racial minorities, LGBT rights, disability rights, the decline in the use of the death penalty, the decline of deaths in war, the decline actually in genocide and politicite and in what's called one-sided violence. And I'd be happy, I've got all the slides, I'm happy to talk about any of those claims with you, but we have to look at change over time. We have to look at change that happens over a decade, two decades of time and you start seeing this change. Also very dramatic improvements in human health and well-being, increases in life expectancy, important decline in infant mortality and child mortality, the virtual elimination of famine, the decline in malnourishment, both as an absolute number and as a percentage of the total population, okay? And dramatic increases in education for women. That's just a few. As I said, I've got a slide on everything I just said, I'd be happy to show it to you, okay? So I think to say that, to say like everything is awful is actually a historical. It's, and so one of the questions asked in the book is why do we say that? Why do we feel that everything has gotten worse? And I argue we, part of it in here, the human rights movement is partly to blame. Why are they partly to blame? Because they have raised awareness and created so much new awareness about more and more human rights problems. Human rights activists have written more and more law so we have a much expanded understanding of what constitutes human rights, okay? And they have grabbed the attention of the media and others, the bouncing abuses. So if you wish the great successes of the human rights movement have created data that might make us think that the world is getting worse. When the truth is we know more and care more about human rights in the world than ever before, okay? And so I use hope because community activists, Saul Alinsky in Chicago, a brilliant community organizer back in the 60s when he was training people, he said you need three things to get social change. You need anger, you need hope, and you need to believe that you can make a difference. And I think today we still need anger and we have plenty of it, okay? And actually what we're short on, what we're short on is having the hope that will sustain struggle. Anger burns out quickly, it doesn't sustain a struggle. So having hope and not just believing you can make a difference but understanding how you can make a difference, okay? And so by looking at, you know, if look at the dramatic increase in the countries that have abolished the death penalty and thinking about Amnesty International's campaign against the death penalty, someone should look carefully at the campaign as a death penalty because we went from 17 countries that abolished the death penalty in 1977 to 100 countries that abolished in law and 140 countries that abolished in law or in practice, practice being no executions for 10 years, okay? Someone should look at that and say, how did they do that? How did they move from 17 to 140 countries that have abolished the death penalty? Because that's a huge success and it'd be interesting to know, not just you can make a difference but how can you make a difference? Okay, before we get to the next question I wanna push you a little bit on this then I'm gonna come back to the audience. And I guess my question is, you know, yes, we have to look at the long run, we have to look at change over time, you're absolutely right, you know, the trends, we don't necessarily know where that's coming from but I wanna ask you the question about, you know, the hard cases, the tough situations and this question of pragmatism that you're very familiar with of, you know, the pragmatism and I know we have a number of very serious people in the audience who have devoted their careers and lives to human rights activism, they might wanna come in on this, I don't know. I'll refrain from what I do in my classroom which is to call on people. But, you know, there are moments of course when any individual organization or activist has to make a choice about whether to take to the streets, whether to push the campaign, when they know or they have a very reasonable, a very strong reason to believe that if they do that, if they take that international money, if they go out on the streets, that what they're going to risk is push back in a way that could at least for a period of time not only endanger them and the people that support them but lead to some sort of restricted space for civil society activism, which of course is what the human rights community has been very worried about for several years now. And I'm curious, you know, it is insignificant to say, well over the long run, but of course these choices have to be made in particular moments, in particular spaces and what is your thinking on that or your work on that, what light have you shed on that? When I presented this book in Bergen, Norway, one of my discussants was an amazing activist and LGBT activist from Uganda and he just basically said part of what you just said, he just goes, it's really hard, it's really hard in this closing space. And I lead the book starting with Eva Maraviev, who is an activist in, and actually I wrote the book partly for people like Eva because she said I've lost hope. So I'm not diminishing at all the danger that many activists are in around the world and how hard it is. I do like to remind people that it wasn't easy in the past and now it's gotten hard. There's this notion sometimes like oh, the 70s were the golden age of human rights and everything was easy then and now it's hard. And it's like no, I was in Washington DC starting 1979, 1981 working on human rights, I promise you that it was not easy. And I don't mean in Washington, I promise you that the groups in Argentina at the time were being killed, were being disappeared, were being, you know, forced into exile, all the most difficult work conditions have always existed in the human rights movement. It's not like there was an easy point and now there's a hard point. And I just think it's important. There's a way that sometimes we forget that past, okay. So yes, there's people who are up against a wall. They're up against a wall. And so I believe the long term does offer some lessons, okay. And so one of those slides I show is 21 countries in the world that have made same sex unions legal, okay. And in Washington you go only 21, then you go oh, the first country in the Netherlands that did 2000. The rest, the remaining 20 are from 2005 to the present. And one of them is Uruguay. Well, I lived in 1976. I started being interested in human rights. And I remember Uruguay in 76, I had friends I later found out self-identify as gay or lesbian, did not tell their closest friends, did not tell their family, could not whisper aloud about their sexual orientation. So for me, the fact that Uruguay has become one of these 21 countries to legalize same sex marriage shows that change is possible as a result of struggle over a long time. Okay, back to the audience. Sarah, right in the middle we have a couple of questions. Hi, I'm Kate Nash from Goldsmiths. I teach in research on human rights. I'm very much looking forward to reading the book. I'm a little bit puzzled right here and now because I think I'm not quite seeing where the international and the national are coming because it seems like a lot of the reasons from hope like Brazil and the kind of rolling out of the same sex marriage is sort of diffusion at the national level. And I suppose the kind of the sort of countercase for norm foundation formation at the international level is something like Sally Engelmerry's work which is, yes, there is norm formation and it is in a particular kind of set if you like. So around gender, for example, it is violence, gender violence, it's not a sort of socialist feminism. It is kind of, it is very much focused on the autonomous individual and so on. So I just, yeah, I'm slightly kind of, I'm not quite clear then, the origins go to the international but then, yeah, I'm a bit puzzled. I'm gonna take, since you're right next to each other and you have the mic, I'm gonna take the two questions together. Hi, I'm Rachel, I'm studying for an MA in human rights law. I'm also a human rights practitioner. I worked for Amnesty for seven years and then with local human rights organizations in Burma for 10 years. I was really interested in what you were saying about human rights watch and the asymmetry, the kind of mining of information provided by grassroots human rights organizations but not treating them as equal partners. I think Amnesty does the same and it's sort of hidden behind this kind of security idea that there is somehow protecting local organizations which is very paternalistic. I just really wonder in your opinion what's it gonna take for that to change from organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty? What's it gonna take for them to treat local human rights organizations as equal partners? So to the first comment, question, I'd say, I mean, since 1998, I've been theorizing transnational advocacy networks and I actually find that this distinction, oh, there's the domestic and there's the international, not realizing all the ways that these, that networked relationships are relating the national and the international, we can, and I try hard actually to find beginning points where things begin but then I talk about, there's boomerangs, there's spirals, there's all sorts of ways that there's an interaction between the international and the domestic. So I talked about Brazil for example but I could have also talked, I talked about Brazil saying they wanted an American court. Today the American court is one of the most innovative courts for human rights norms, the stuff they've done on accountability for example, new findings on, again on LGBT rights, tremendous findings on indigenous rights. Why do those cases get there? Because indigenous groups, for example, in the Americas know that they are a small minority in their countries and they're being repressed but they have had good luck taking cases to the Inter-American Commission. Once they get that case, they can use it back home in their struggles. So the activists in the Global South know how to boomerang. I always say I learned the boomerang from Argentine human rights activists, I didn't invent it, I watched it and wrote it down. I say that in the book, by the way, I don't claim credit for it, I say I learned it from the Argentines. And so I think yes, we have to conceptualize in much more complex ways this North South thing and that's one reason I'm so kind of, I feel upset about intellectually worried about the fact that we see the Global North and the Global South and we're able to talk about human rights being posed by the Global North on the Global South. It's so crude of an understanding that it doesn't get at these very complex linkages that exist trans-nationally and that existed even in the time of Alejandro Alvarez. He's part of a trans-national judicial network, 1917. So then we also read in the past, oh yes, we have trans-national networks but people then didn't speak trans-nationally and transmit ideas trans-nationally. How to, well, it's a, if you look and you know because you've worked inside, you know there's lots of different people in these organizations and the person I always hold up as a model is Juan Mendez, someone who was a political prisoner in Argentina who then was head of America's Watch for Human Rights Watch, worked as legal counsel, went to the International Transitional Justice, National Center for Transitional Justice. And so why? Because he came, you know, he always was able to kind of link worlds together and with a great humility. And so I'm not sure whether humility is part of it. I'm not sure whether, you know, just lived experience trying to hammer things out with colleagues in different places. You may have lived this yourself. I think it's no easy task. Okay, we have a number of hands here. We have one right back here in the middle front row. Then one over here. Thanks very much. I'm Lewis Turner. I'm doing a PhD in the politics department here. I wanted to ask you about something you just said in one of your responses which was about the increased documentation of human rights violations and how that can in part be responsible for our understanding that things are getting worse. And I wanted to ask if this seeming evidence of things getting worse is in fact, evidence of things getting better, then what would evidence of things actually getting worse look like? That's a great question from us. We don't usually do methodology like that. So, you know, it's complex. We've got to talk about different rights. So let me give you a couple of examples. Back in activist beyond borders, I already used a term I called the information paradox. I used it in the chat. Mimi Kek and I used it in the chapter on women's rights. And we said that basically there wasn't data on violence against women. Why? Because the women's human rights movement transnationally had drawn attention to this issue of violence, the way violence happened in all of our societies, right? And often led to countries and organizations to start gathering data on violence, okay? So initially, when you saw the increase in violence, you thought, you know, there's more, oh, you know, there's more violence. And so what happens, one, you have to wait until data can level off. I have a colleague at the Kennedy School, a guy named Malcolm Sparrow. He writes on the character of harms. He says, we know this. We know that if a city puts in a hotline for violence against women, we know violence will go up. So what you should do, first is you should warn people that's gonna happen. You go, we're putting in a hotline. What it means is women are gonna feel more secure. They're gonna call. Initially, it's gonna look that violence goes up. But over time, if we keep the same systems in place, we should start getting the idea of trends, okay? Then there's a problem of hidden harms versus not hidden harms. So like my data on the abolition of the death penalty is very solid. It's not hidden, no? And so from day one, we've got good data. Country abolishes death penalty. It's really hard to hide, okay? Torture data isn't notoriously bad, right? Because you can torture in any police station, right? And so again, in the persistent power of human rights, we make the distinction between the compliance is easier, where you have this centralized compliance decision, like with the death penalty, than these very decentralized kinds of issues. And then finally, for those of you who work on databases, events-based data is better than standard-based data. So I've written an article critiquing to standard-based data on physical integrity rights. One is the Siri physical integrity scale. And one is the political terror scale is called. It's about integrity rights as well. They code into a five-point scale or an eight-point scale and they use Amnesty International Reports and the US State Department reports, okay? The problem is those reports kept getting bigger and bigger and the human rights movement kept providing more and more information that was then used by both Amnesty and the State Department. So they, and so, and it's a long story, but my point is, yes, I can say some things, specific things about what data we can trust more and what data we should be more worried about and not some of it we can't resolve. We can't resolve the fact that both domestic abuse and torture are hidden harms and the perpetrators will do everything possible to keep us from knowing. And if you have more groups working on it, we're gonna learn more about it, but we can't depend that that more we know is a trend until for a long time. A gentleman over here. Oh, sorry, here and then in the back. And then over here, okay. Thank you for your talk. Otavio Ferras from King's College London, Human Rights Law Academic. I really enjoyed the book. I'm almost finishing it. I'm totally convinced both about the legitimacy and the effectiveness argument. What I'm not entirely convinced about is when you talk about human rights institutions and law being a powerful tool to tackle inequality. And I'm talking about economic inequality, not the status inequality. So civil and political rights, social economic rights, discrimination, I think the evidence is really strong. But economic inequality, the evidence is actually the opposite, right? In the past 30, 40 years, inequality has risen almost everywhere and even Brazil where I come from, there's new data now showing that there's more decreasing inequality wasn't really that big. So first question, is there evidence for hope even there? Or in the second one, strategically, isn't it not a risky move to try and include economic inequality within human rights as well? The same question could be formulated for climate change. Are we not putting too much in the human rights account? And a two star, before you answer right here, right there, two fingers, so I'll take these two together. Thank you, thank you again for a fascinating talk. My question is this, I guess looking at the long-term trends you've talked about, obviously in that time the US has been the global hegemon and has been at least rhetorically a great supporter of international human rights. So looking forward and in terms of hope, how seriously do you take the threat of Donald Trump in terms of setting precedents when you have the leader of the country that has strategically supported human rights to such a great extent historically when he praises political strongmen from Putin to Cecy and all around the world. Thank you. So first I'm gonna say, can I pull up a slide still for my slideshow? Yeah, for sure you can. Oh, yeah. Can I just, no? So let me start, because I'm gonna pull the slide on economic inequality, so let me start on this one. So I finished this book before the Trump election. I made a few changes, but not as many as you would think. Why? Because the historical chapters on the Cold War actually demonstrate that the United States has been very ambivalent, has had very ambivalent practice and rhetoric with regard to human rights for a long time, okay? And so it's really not that new to have the United States on the wrong side. I think that the Trump administration is, in my lifetime, the biggest nightmare for human rights, policy in the United States that I know, okay? But I'm talking about the 50s and 60s in Latin America where the United States government is supporting coups in Guatemala, a coup that I believe led to increasingly violent regimes into the genocide of 1981, okay? People in the US, in the US government said, what if we had an Arbenz today? If we only had an Arbenz today, the man we overthrew in 54, okay? Not to mention the coup in Chile where we were also involved. The Latin Americans are trying to draft, are trying to create the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, and the US advisor says, he goes, we really can't help you. We won't be able to ratify, and we really can't help because of our federal problem. Well, the federal problem was states' rights problems around segregation. The United States government could not help write the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights because segregationists in the United States were so worried that international law would be used to end Jim Crow, okay? So the United States has a mixed record on this, and I wrote a book called Mixed Messages was exactly about Latin America and US foreign policy, and there are really some really good high points, like the support the US Embassy gave to documenting the disappearances in Argentina, right? Or, and there are some very low points, and so we're at a particularly low point now, but it shouldn't be so unfamiliar as you made it sound. And you have the inequality question. Okay, inequality question. Okay, and we only have a couple of minutes, so I'm gonna let you answer that, and then we'll take a couple really quickly closing on. So the first, so this, I don't even know how, I'm gonna have to go through everything, sorry. So the first thing I would say is that the one of the arguments I make is, Sam Moyne says, human rights are powerless against economic inequality. And so I just say, it's not clear why that would be the case, since human rights have contributed to the decline in all sorts of status inequality around race, gender, sexual orientation, and others. And we know that status inequality is linked to economic inequality of individuals, right? Because if you are a persecuted gender, sexual, racial minority, that also has tended to make you impoverished as well. So we know that improving status inequality can improve your economic situation. So that's the first point. Why is it that human rights has been so good on status would all of a sudden become helpless? Second, because I've really watched a lot of litigation in Latin America, and the Latin American human rights organizations are doing a lot of interesting litigation on indigenous rights, on water, on the right to health, not just Latin Americans. The Indian Supreme Court had a place on the right to food, the South African Supreme Court on the right to housing. There's very interesting litigation going on using human rights embodied in constitution sometimes. The Indian Supreme Court right to food was the right to food embodied in the Indian constitution, but that came out of the human rights law. So that's another reason is that I say, I'm not sure why they're helpless because I see them litigating, and in the Indian case was food, I see some very interesting results. Or indigenous rights, for example. I think the American court has made a real contribution to the greater equality that indigenous people face in the Americas. This is data on income inequality, income inequality in the top 1% in 1900, 2010. The reason, we don't have good data on inequality because the Gini coefficient was what we normally use, we don't have for most countries and for most years. So that's why we're using this top 1%. And what you see are two different patterns of income inequality, one for English speaking countries, as follow this U shape, okay? And those of us in the United States in the UK should be very worried. We are reaching inequality levels that haven't been seen since the beginning of the 20th century, okay? But there's a different pattern here, so-called L-shaped pattern in continental Europe and Japan. And so it's not that we should be complacent. You see inequality inching up in Sweden, for example, but it's a very different pattern with this is L-shaped, which is more of a leveling off. What that means is that social policy, domestic social policy can make a huge difference. And campaigns for domestic social policy in places like continental Europe, human rights language is one of the things that you can use when you campaign for policy. And if you get the right social policy, you get very different outcomes. So we're not inevitably, just because of the modern world when the countries are not inevitably destined to be unequal, there's powerful social policy tools that can address inequality and human rights is one of the arguments people can make when they're lobbying for those kinds of policies. And I just wanna make one final count because sometimes we forget about this. Inequality is increasing dramatically in some countries. Inequality between countries in the world has been reduced. And we don't always recognize that. Why? With China and India growing so much, right? It turns out that the gap between the rich and the poor, if we count countries, not individuals, has reduced. That was a long time concern of international relations theorists, okay? This is Bronco Milanovic, he wanted my source, okay? But it's not a mystery, it's actually a known fact. Inequality between and among countries has been reduced. But we're not, we don't mention that because we're understandably alarmed about the fact that inequality within some countries is increasing, including within China and India, okay? So I just, my point is, human rights is not. The only tool, it may not even be the preferred tool. It's certainly not powerless, as Moyne says, against economic inequality. I think we're gonna have to stop there because we're at eight o'clock. We have drinks upstairs. I welcome, we welcome all of you, pleased to come up and to say hello to Catherine and to have a drink. But thank you and join me in thanking Catherine for a fabulous evening. That's great, thank you.