 Thank you very much. Good evening, good afternoon. Seems like it's already dark. I'm truly honored and privileged to be here. And I have this annoying habit of honoring a privilege by challenging the audience or challenging the authors or the initiators of the invitation. In the sense that I don't believe that it's really appropriate just to simply to come and repeat what we already do and accept and agree upon. So I would like to look for ways in which I can challenge without being offensive. I hope that is my hope. Because I think it's important that we have the privilege of speaking to each other in this very civil, very deliberative environment and for that privilege we owe each other and our communities to challenge each other to raise questions, to question our assumptions and so on. Actually, with all due respect again, thinking of Montesquieu and what he would think of me being here talking to you today. That is something that is I would hint at without saying too much about it because I think we tend to speculate about is he likely to agree or disagree welcome my being here or resent my being here. And I have reason to wonder that way having read his book in order to prepare for this lecture and so it is really remarkable and a true privilege that I am here whether he would have approved or not and I am here to honor his work but also to question it or to honor it by questioning it and again I am also trying to honor Professor William Wittebin because he has been the organizer and the initiator of this series of lectures and unfortunately with the tragic death of him with his family over the Ukraine a couple of years ago now I think that raises the question of our inherent human vulnerability that even someone like him who lived a lifetime trying to live with superior values, human values and to infuse those values in all the way that he does and yet he and his family have to suffer such a tragic death but I also take the incident and the tragedy as an indicator not only of our human vulnerability but also about the limitations of the systems we work with for the protection of human rights and human dignity and accountability for crimes of war and so on because it's unlikely that the true perpetrators of that atrocious crime whenever come to account for it and that also one wonders about it's just that I think it's a very good time to reflect and to consider what we might take from this tragic incident the point also I would draw is because I mean for him to have died and his family and so many other people to have died in that tragic incident in this region in this part of the world it makes you wonder what is going on elsewhere but it makes you also appreciate that all of us human rights are not respected everywhere they cannot respect it anywhere so we have to understand that none of us is immune none of us is beyond the sort of contingencies or vulnerabilities of being human when the Mahatma Gandhi I think it's report I don't know I'm not sure of course if he said it or not when the Mahatma Gandhi was asked about western civilization it's reported that he responded it's a good idea and I think I would like to borrow that sort of piercing insight and weight of the Mahatma Gandhi to say about human rights it sounds like a good idea and what I would like to raise with us here to reflect on is whether we have really truly honored that idea and advanced it in the last 67 years or so since the university declaration or are we really wasting the possibilities and the need sort of failing to address the need and to remove the obstacles if anything I would like to suggest that we have added to the obstacles and that we seem to be pursuing a mirage of legal protection of human rights under the international law regime and that we really need to think more fundamentally about possibilities of shifting the paradigm because I think the nature of what we now have invested in the protection of human rights is the regime that we have invested in I would suggest is totally and utterly incapable of protecting human rights anywhere including in this continent so that is at least the trend where I am heading with my remarks the task that I see is or the point I would like to suggest as my core thesis you might say is that I sort of claim that the state centric legalistic approach to the protection of human rights is incapable of delivering on that challenge and it has utterly failed already but it tends to really create more obstacles in the path of the protection of human rights and we have to remember I think we are talking about protection and actually one of the questions that we should ask is what does protection mean when we have a regime that can only talk about the need for protection without delivering that protection in concrete terms so that is the primary task of this remarks and then I will touch on other aspects that might be relevant to our conversation as well as very much appropriately mentioned by the deal about the refugee crisis that is now in Europe and here I would like to suggest that the refugee crisis has exposed I think the collapse of the European front for the protection of human rights because refugees are really the true ultimate subjects of human rights the point is that of course we have constitutional rights we have legal regimes that protect various types of rights in various settings but the idea of universality of human rights as the rights of the human without any qualification than being human national origin nor race nor gender nothing except just being human being and then to consider to what extent have we or are we capable now my point is not just simply that we have failed but that we could not possible succeed without from the mentally challenging the international regime that we live with because now the point we see a couple of days ago European leaders meeting for Osamae to try to aware to mediate to reduce the challenge but really none of them and none of the people who speak of it is rising to the level of the challenge and occasion refugees because they do not qualify for the protection of the host countries and they cannot hope for protection of their countries of origin are truly in a limbo they are not benefiting from the traditional systems of international law of state protection and state responsibility neither the state which is where they happen to be now or the state from which they have flown but the point is that since the structures and concepts by which we seek to claim to protect human rights are necessarily state based and centric that they tend to suffer from the limitations of territoriality and that every human being at every point in our lives have to be in some jurisdiction that the nature of the globe as has been now achieved through colonialism is such that we have these notions of suffering states which are in control of every single inch of land everywhere so that human beings unless we live in suspended animation sort of we have to be somewhere and the question is whether wherever we are the protection of our rights as human and for no other reason than our being human can reach us and can make the difference if they need to make. Now it is of course raised and the point was raised already by some students I was talking to yesterday here in this school about that there are obvious reasons why states are so hesitating and so ambivalent about what to do because states are responsible to their populations and their populations are the ones who are telling them not to allow refugees in and it is the populations who are saying that we cannot afford this it's creating more destabilization and political challenges and it might tamper with our culture, with our values, our style and yes of course all of that is these are valid from a democratic point of view that states should be responsive to the democratic demands of their own populations but my point is why the populations are making those demands so the failure is not the failure of European states it is the failure of European peoples that European including us in this room I should not include myself in it but I will not accept to say that I am part of this. To see that really that when we have the bigoted stereotypical sort of everything that goes against the notion of the equal humanity of the other and the need for protection of the other we have not responded sufficiently and appropriately to the causes of the flight of the refugees to begin with and we are not now responding to the challenge of what to do about the people who are at our doors, the people who are among us and they should have if we are true to our commitment to human rights they should be entitled to equal protection of the rights just like national citizens and like law for residence because at least the claim of being a refugee has to be honoured but when we look and see the nature of the international system and the international treaty that is supposed to regulate the status of refugees we find that it is very inadequate and in fact the whole treaty regime I would suggest is inadequate and don't think that it is capable and as I will try to clarify the nature of the law of treaties is intended for other types of obligations and human rights obligations that I would like to suggest that human rights treaties are orphans that they do not fit in the normal structure of the law of treaties and they cannot be expected to be honoured through that regime so I think that the fact that we can understand why the European states are independent, we can understand it but we cannot condone it because it is not the states fault, of course the states are just simply institutions that will deliver on the will and the political choices that the population of those states make so if there is someone at fault it is the populations who are at fault because they are refusing to acknowledge the equal humanity of the people who have come and travelled for reasons that we can understand but we have not challenged and we can talk about this if you like in terms of why did these refugees had to flee Syria for example in Libya or anywhere else in the first place that it is not nobody would flee their home country by choice I have been through this myself in the 1980s I had to flee Sudan and I have lived outside Sudan since but I would never have left if I had a choice so this notion that people are fleeing by choice and that they are seeking a better economic situation is really a pretext to avoid to have to confront the fundamental moral question of our responsibility for the humanity of these populations now you might ask what has Montesquieu got to do with all of this that is in what way is Montesquieu's life and work relevant to these questions and I would like to suggest here that of course I mean the notion of smoking gum in terms of attributing particular views and particular consequences to particular authors is not really in the human experience it is not possible to do that and it is not very productive to do that so I am not seeking to indict Montesquieu personally he is a very nice man for the time he lived in the place he lived for the class he represented for the gender he enjoyed and all of that so in other ways Montesquieu is a product of his environment of his class of his gender of his entitlements and privileges that he enjoyed and that is really a statement of fact it is not a judgment that he was less of a human being because of that but the question becomes is what have we done with what he had thought and spoke of I am not interested in trying to pin responsibility on him personally for what we are now suffering in the limitations of our paradigms and systems but that what have we done with or without his work up to the present time that is the ways in which all sort of major intellectuals or philosophers like him would be contested and people would always argue about what did he say what did he mean by what he said and the point is that whatever it is that we can conclude that he has contributed to that is the point I am making I am not as I said interested in lighting him but I am saying that to the extent that he has contributed to the formation of European national state systems which are bureaucratic, hierarchical, coercive, centralized and that he has contributed to the notions of positive law to that extent he has contributed to the outcome that we live with and it is that outcome which I believe is the fundamental barrier to the protection of human rights today because the point the whole point of university of human rights are that they are more than the rights of the citizen they are the rights of the human and yet when we have every other aspect of our systems focusing on the rights of the citizen and the law for resident but not the rights of the human as human then we have problems so my point is that probably his way as understood by Europeans for generations have led to a self understanding of Europeans that they have a mandate to go globally and project the values and the regimes and the system that he spoke of and other European enlightenment philosophers spoke of as global standards so I am here suggesting that we cannot challenge or deny the reality of European self understanding of a civilizing mission that European armies, European navies have set out and try to create situations where they will dictate to other people how they should live their lives, how they should structure their institutions, how they should organize their legal and normative systems and that in doing so have created a global model that now is haunting us because of its limitations in protecting this fundamental value that we speak of so it is that aspect of it without suggesting necessarily that he was personally knowingly as criminal lawyers tend to think or intentionally intended that to happen but that is I think the outcome now I do have some difficulties with his work and primarily it is to do with of course as I say he is a product of his time his context, his class, I always keep saying class, class because it is very significant in fact the most significant thing about Montesquieu is his class and having lived at a time when that class signified tremendous privilege and necessarily signified fundamental advantage and dehumanization for populations all around him but what I am saying about the difficulties of trying to retrieve something out of his thought some of it has to do with is methodological and some of it is probably a matter of style which signifies sort of an attitude or a type of view of human beings and humanity and of course I don't have time to tell it all in the paper, hopefully you will read the paper at some point and you will see the quotations that I make and the evidence that I would try to present here but as I say because I am not seeking an indictment, I am trying to create sort of a sense of where this has come from and where it is going about the methodology for example there is the tendency to arbitrarily pick up examples from various cultures and epochs. He would cite something from the Roman and the Greek and jump to cite something from the Americas to go to the East and so that I don't think that there is and again of course I am judging by today's standards of social science research and thought in which we tend to present coherent methodologies that will be defensible for their outcomes but that factor is the factor of rather arbitrary selectivity and that also is a view of law as static and given that is when he speaks about how our laws or the laws of any society relates to the religion, the moors, the habits and even climate of peoples and communities that may be true but the question of human agency in the creation of law is absent to my reading. I don't see it. I see just simply static deterministic view of law that is due to these multiple factors but the question of human choices that people make and human struggles, political struggles that people engage in in order to promote their well being according to their own vision of who they are, I don't see that in his writing. But also that I sensed and again I'm sure that some of you have some of these or some of you have had to refute it. I think I see a profound racism in his language at some point in I think in the spirit of the laws he speaks about he says if I am to defend the slave trade or slavery of the African populations, you know the trans Atlantic slave trade, he says if I am to defend it this is what I would say. So that will imply that he is not really seriously personally adopting the position, he is only speaking with him hypothetically. But to me I think the level of detail to which he goes after making that disclaimer you might say and the language he uses in describing these unfortunate populations and with all due respect what I sense the relish by which he is presenting these views is more than just simply someone who is hypothetically defending a position which he did not need to adopt in the first place or to accept the charge of defending in the first place. And I wonder also why he focused on African slaves without thinking of other or talking about other types of communities which have been subject to slavery including Europeans for centuries. So slavery is not peculiarly African and yet you find in the language for example when I said about language there is a passage which I think I caught in the paper he speaks about on the slavery of Negroes Negroes and so he so gratitiously go on to expand. So because he said because the subjects are blacks from head to toe this is the translation of the most conservative translation of the word and you will find that is quoted that because they are blacks from head to toe and they have such flat noses that it is almost impossible to feel sorry for them he goes on to say that it is impossible to us to assume that these people are men because if we are to assume they were men one would begin to believe that we are ourselves not Christian. What does that mean? What is he saying? But I think whatever it is I think it's offensive and I don't think that it is all justified or sort of dismissed by the hypothetical way that he formulated the notion to begin with. Now moving on slightly to present the title of my talk is to say that the spirit of laws is not universal by that of course I'm referring the phrase is very famous I think below but everybody when you say the spirit of laws people know exactly what you are talking about but I'm saying that by its very nature the spirit of laws the idea that he presented is an insight that he presented indicates to the diversity not uniformity or universality that every legal system, every system of laws is relative to the population, to the context, to the history, to the environment and the various factor that he speaks of so it is already self evident there but my point is beyond that the very premise of state and state centric legal systems and the very premise of positive law of the state is not universal it was not universal then and it is not universal now so if we are talking about universality of human rights we have to take seriously the concerns of people who do not see their view of normativity and their view of life experience of political institutions in the systems that we are working with so this goes back to my point about the European self understanding of a missionary global conquest in order to spread this highly intelligent and organized and systematic notion of legal systems I think that the imperial European project which sought to universalize the state system and the state centric notion of legality has come to sort of again be taken on at the moment of the emergence of the modern human rights doctrine and movement in the late 1940s and here of course just to emphasize the point and we think often as a student of this field in the 1960s we are always thought that the American declaration of independence the first declaration of the man and citizen, even the Mark Carter were human rights documents, no they were not because none of those documents had to do anything to do with the rights of the human, they all dealt with the right of the citizen and there is a major difference because the whole point of my remarks so far at least to emphasize that the universality means inclusive holistic totally universality of every human being no matter which culture which how flat my nose is or how dark my color of skin is that this is the point so it is this imperial project out of European enlightenment that went about to present these views is what is really disturbing and I think that we need to reconsider seriously in his discourse in book number 9 and number 10 he speaks about the connection between commerce and conquest and that imperialism can be justified in the promotion of peace and commerce which is a very dangerous formula if I may say so because it dispels to me this again impulse to pretend that you have, you are authorized because the question is whose conception of peace and commerce to whose benefit is the conception that is going on and again it sounds almost neoliberal in the more recent sort of vein of the time that we live in and here I would like to maybe jar your thinking a little bit by invoking Saeed Qub Saeed Qub is the Egyptian ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood he did his work in the 1940s and 50s and he was executed by Nasser in the 1960s I think around 66 or so Saeed Qub is really the father the intellectual father of all the modern Islamist movement across the Muslim world and elsewhere too and he made an argument for jihad because Muslims like myself have always had a problem with jihad and I cannot accept the notion of jihad as aggressive war that you can just simply march off and persuade sorry, coerce other people to embrace Islam and so on so he argued that no no no this is not coercion, we are not imposing on other people we are only engaging in this conquest in order because the leaders of those societies are not permitting us to propagate Islam peacefully to their communities so that to be able to propagate Islam in different communities we need to sort of get rid of the leaders who are creating obstacles to our access to their populations which to me sounds like also this notion about trade and peace or commerce and peace as a sort of rationalization of imperial conquests and so on I don't know to what extent I should be careful here time tends to sneak on you as you can imagine let me move on to some remarks about what I think is the structural inadequacies of the current international system for the protection of human rights so because the point the more important point to me is not a critique of Montesquieu or his language or his style or his assumptions but it is that he may have contributed to the emergence of a system that other Europeans have affected over the centuries and have used globally to impose their views and their choices and their economies and their interests on everybody else. The point is that when I said structurally when it comes to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 adopted and proclaimed in Paris the fact that really the physical voice or the vast majority of humanity was absent that out of the 50 or so members of the United Nations at the time there were only four African countries represented the United Nations and those were Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia and South Africa. The rest of Africa now 54 countries were absent not only absent they were colonized by the same powers who were proclaiming the Universal Declaration in Paris. That the continuation of French colonialism in Algeria until the 1962 and the brutal suppression of Algerian resistance and Algerian demands for independence by the French who just emerged from the Nazi occupation. Only to repeat the strategies of collective punishment of torture that the Nazis practice on French people to do so in Algeria at the same time. So it is this history we do not forget this history we will keep reminding people of and in acting in accordance with an awareness of the consequences of that history we will not stop making the points and so so I think that the nature of the regime is that I'm sure that there are many international lawyers here so I shouldn't presume to explain too much about this but simply to say that the nature of treaty obligations is that they are among states between states. Only states have the legal obligation only states have the capacity to implement and to enforce that obligation. So that what we now talk about as non-state actors even to think of who may have shot that plane over in eastern Europe over the Ukraine it might be very difficult for an international law point of view to hold anybody accountable because it could be a private crime but to make it a human rights violation it has to be attributed to a state and which state will accept responsibility for that conduct and what consequences can follow given our insistence on state sovereignty and immunities that we know in the nature of international system it's very unlikely that we can follow through with all of that but in any case the idea of enforcement by subsequent response to the events is extremely inadequate. It's really trivial with all due respect. To expect that we can really trace and it is always after the fact so human rights violations I am from Sudan I speak about violations in Darfur in the Civil War with the South and also itself and I speak of that out of personal experience I was in prison when this was going on next door and all of that but therefore I'm not saying that it is really the intention or the wish or the responsibility of European peoples and their states that they engage in these practices but I'm talking about the nature of the international legal system and the national state relations that make it possible for these atrocities to be committed with impunity and I hear with all due respect again to say that I am in another lands I realize I know that I'm really challenging a sacred cow but I do not believe that the international court or criminal court is really making any difference or is likely ever to make any difference for the protection of human rights. The idea that we seek individual protection against individual actors whom we are trying to investigate and convict at the highest level of evidentiary and procedure requirements it is so refined it is so idealistic that it is very unlikely to be able to engage significant numbers of the vast thousands and hundreds of thousands of human rights perpetrators for years to achieve one conviction but even that conviction has no way of impacting back into the sort of filtering back into the situation of people on the ground. So what difference does it make for the civil war in Congo or the so called civil war or just simply of the rape of women what does it make to the recruitment of children that we pick someone and engage in a process that continues for years in order to achieve a conviction that never registers in the consciousness and the experience of people who are suffering those atrocities on the ground and that it does not have an impact on the truth really I mean just to think about it and think how is that likely to happen but the most serious objection I have to the ICC is precisely the western legalistic and positivistic notion of accountability and here I will mention the example of Darfur again since I am from Sudan in that of course as the just one level of the limitation of the international system is that Al-Bashir and the regime that he constructed and ruled through for 25, 27 years almost by now is committing these atrocities killing hundreds of thousands of his population in Darfur the international community comes to the gate and say would you please allow us to get into your country so that they can stop you from killing your own people that's exactly what happened they were not willing to take the case to chapter 7 they were not willing to commit troops and to engage in a sort of humanitarian law enforcement or international law enforcement in a way that can really be meaningful for the victims of those atrocities but then you come and charge Al-Bashir who is the sitting president with crimes against humanity, crimes of torture and other crimes and he continues to be the sitting president for a decade after the charges are presented and he is in a position and he has done it, he has totally destroyed any evidence on which he can be convicted so what sense would you have in terms of presenting charges at a time when you are incapable of arresting the accused, incapable of protecting witnesses incapable of preserving evidence it mocks the whole process itself but the most ultimate objection to it from my perspective is that individual retribution dimension of it that has nothing to say about traditional African mechanism of reconciliation and going forward for communities to reconcile and to heal and to be able to live together so what we have seen in Rwanda, what we see in Darfur which is the reality across the continent is that people would not care so much about punishing previous atrocities as they would care about creating conditions for peaceful coexistence and cooperation among communities going forward but the traditional African notions of justice and accountability is much more profound, much more constructive and much more able to truly pre-empt human rights violations rather than react to them in retrospect than what the international community is capable of through something like the ICC. In my student days and I continue to encounter this situation is that the liberal relativistic view of rights because we always have this talk about liberal values are human rights values but everybody else's values are sort of cultural relativistic and really not universal but I would like to suggest that liberal values are relativist too there is no human being on this earth no human being in this room who is not relativist we are all relative to who we are, where we're born, where our parents, what level of education we had, what level of employment we had and all of these factors that influence the way we perceive the world and the way we decide and think about the values that we want to promote so there is no neutral human being we are all products of our conscience, our institutions, our values and religious and otherwise so therefore the notion that so just to give a very brief example here the notion of justice ability that we will rest to believe that if it is not a right that you can contest by going to a court to have it enforced then it is not a human right it is not a right to begin with and therefore it cannot be a human right which is a relativist sort of liberal view but can hardly address the concerns and profound worries of human beings around the world there are no courts where you can contest rights to begin with, there are no legal systems I lived in Sudan, I grew up in Sudan, we were traveling for days without encountering a single policeman let alone a court and a judge and an attorney or a lawyer who can represent you in these complex litigations so it is really something that is suited for national legal regimes in the European mode but not really appropriate for vast parts of the world elsewhere of course economic and social rights are very difficult for liberals to conceive of as human rights altogether and this is not history this is still consistent with the European Convention of Human Rights 1950 which does not include a single civil and political right whereas the university declaration self concluded several so the point therefore is about that relativity is a problem a challenge to universality but we are all implicated in relativity and we should not really define the problem in a way that absorbs us from the difficulties of relativist values and then to accuse the others of the same now to go further to also because I'm trying to highlight certain features of the current regime that we have and how it is really not conducive or capable of protecting human rights to the scale and speed that we need to have because the whole question is about jurisdiction about state sovereignty about the fact that states cannot be coerced into ratifying human rights treaties and if they do they can enter reservations even when reservations are not consistent with what the essence of the treaties about there is no political authority in other states party to the treaty to contest the reservations of other treaties so in other ways the treaty regime is premised on the fact that the various party states to the treaty have vested interest in contesting each other's failure to comply with the treaty including contesting the inappropriateness or the self defeating notion of certain types of reservation that may be presented but all of this happens in non-treaties, border treaties, tax any type of treaties where states have a vested interest in the process but for human rights no state cares that there are many states including major western powers which totally reviewed yet the meaning of a treaty by the reservation that they enter like the United States which would not ratify most treaties that other states I mean as we know the rights of the child convention is only United States Malia who have not ratified but I'm not waiting for the rights to ratify because it's not going to make any difference because of the level of reservations that they enter for everything that they ratify so these are the nature of the structure of the international regime that we have but then coming to the aspect of the movement and here I speak as a former director of Africa watch because that was my experience as an African who became director of Africa watch, now a division of human rights watch but at that time it was transitioning from being an autonomous entity to part of human rights watch that the point I saw it that my task is to make myself redundant that I thought that the best thing that Africa watch can do is to make it self redundant in the sense that the people whose rights we claim and pretend to protect should be able to be able to protect their own rights and that we should not be relevant to them so that we can come and protect them but the point I was told that this is foolish it's not going to happen we have to continue to protect these people's rights because they cannot protect their own rights which to me is an ultimate insult I mean the point is that if they are unable until they do they are not going to be their human rights but at the point I'm talking about what I call human rights dependency which is the idea that northern countries organizations send delegations to monitor human rights violations in the south we do not find delegations from the south coming to investigate human rights violations in the north as they know human rights violations in the north of course they are but the process is not sort of mutual the assumption is that the north is fine the south is problematic so we send delegations to monitor human rights violations in specific themes particular locations for two weeks collecting information from local NGOs and then we come back to London or New York to write our reports in English or other for English primarily that's Amnesty may publish in seven months sort of some translations but the point is that the intention is not to report back to the population whose rights are being violated and whose in whose name we claim to speak but that they simply wait for our agency to move our governments which are done so that they can set political conditionalities and other types of mechanism in order to make south governments accountable and so on but the point is that nobody questions the underlying premise of dependency in the first place why is it that African states are dependent on northern and donor sort of goodwill all these decades after independence nobody is raising that question not only that but in fact that dependency is legitimized by pretending that the spectacle that we are using it to protect human rights but we are not challenging it itself there is no challenge to structural relationships between global souths and global norths and other states so that we can create conditions where we can prevent human rights violations in those situations I have I will conclude with just simply a note on a project that I'm trying to develop which is I call decolonizing human rights because my claim is that the human rights field conceptually normatively, institutionally has been colonized and continues to be colonized that the institution that are supposed to serve the system are not representative of global communities all over the world that is the universality of human rights to my mind should be reflected at the normative level, at the institutional level at the political level and all other levels in the sense that it should be so if I live in situations where tribal elders are more able to mediate or resolve conflicts and tensions or resources avoid further violence among their communities I need that to be acknowledged I need that to be respected and incorporated at least in dealing with my issues but to bring the international criminal court to impose a totally alien and unrealistic extremely expensive and of course who's paying for it I know that the Netherlands is a major contributor the primary contributor probably but I challenge all of this and I will say that unless we really shift to a true sense of the accepting and respecting the human dignity of the other in all aspects normatively so it is not just simply about the ability to draft treaties in ways that we can say that our values are represented in them which is not true for the global south at this point but also to say that our priorities for collective rights for intergenerational claims about the environment so is it possible for a liberal mindset or a liberal institution to accept the possibility of contesting environmental concerns intergenerationally in terms of future generations who are entitled to justice who cannot yet contest these cases, cannot take the issue to accord to enforce and nobody always on the right in a way that enables us to act accordingly so these are multiple problems which ultimately come to this point about the challenge and that that challenge is about a state-centric system that's incapable of protecting human rights and the answer is in our hands, whether we go back to reinterpret Montesquieu or go forward and look somewhere else to create conditions and normative systems that will be truly inclusive thank you very much well I've been asked to briefly reflect on the excellent lecture by Professor Anaim but before I do so I would like to take the opportunity to say what an honour it is for me to do so at the event of our Montesquieu lecture which was previously organised by our late colleague Willem Wittevein very much missed in our academic community. As mentioned by our dean, Corine Prince, Professor Anaim was one of the first scholars and has remained at the forefront of issues such as intercultural dialogue and the need to negotiate between the universal and the local on behalf of tolerance and human rights issues that have only become more pertinent especially also here in the Netherlands and it's very much a privilege to have you in our midst here today. Also on a more personal note I had the opportunity to meet Professor Anaim I think it's about 25 years ago and our path crossed when I was working at the Netherlands Human Rights Institute and Professor Anaim was a visiting scholar. I can imagine Professor Anaim might not remember but I very much do because the meeting left a lasting impression on me so it's really an honour for me to have the opportunity to do this today. The lecture was an exploration of a number of concepts that seem to me to lie at the heart of the human rights predicament today and Professor Anaim does not mince words I quote from the paper which is really very much worth reading and I hope you will Professor Anaim says the current legalistic state centric approach has utterly and totally failed in providing any protection of human rights whatsoever and Professor Anaim also refers to the totally inappropriate means of so-called international protection but in your paper you don't stop there and you continue to suggest an alternative a people-centered alternative to human rights protection and I dare to say that this is characteristic for Professor Anaim and his work. On previous occasions Professor Anaim has labelled himself as a pragmatic optimist which is refreshing in a time when it seems very popular to declare that human rights have reached a dead end as for example Eric Posner did last year and I find the approach of Professor Anaim much more constructive and most refreshing because it's very easy to be a pessimist and not to come up with any solutions but it's much more difficult to actually come up with constructive ideas Well the rich lecture and paper addresses several themes and I distil two themes that I would like to react to and that's the inadequacy of the state centric approach and a need for as Professor Anaim calls it in the paper a more people-centered alternative for enforcement These are pertinent issues also in my own field of research interest business and human rights and I see many parallels I would like to pose three questions or questions concerning the following three issues Firstly Professor Anaim you focus exclusively on the state and the relationship between citizens and people with their state I would argue that there is actually a need to re-conceptualise power beyond political power and to include economic power The second issue I would like to reflect upon concerns the issue of enforcement of human rights and what we actually mean with enforcement and thirdly the proposal you do in your paper for an alternative to human rights enforcement, the people-centered alternative also raises several questions of a rather practical nature So let me start with the latter The third issue is the central alternative to human rights protection Listening to Professor Anaim the famous words of Eleanor Roosevelt come to mind, one of the drafters of the universal declaration of human rights On the tenth anniversary of the universal declaration she said the following Where after all do human rights begin? In small places, close to home, so close and so small are the maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person, the neighbourhood he lives in, the school or college he attends, the factory, farm or office where he works Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere Without concerned citizens action to uphold them close to home we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world This is the point I think exactly stressed by Professor Anaim in his lecture. The content and application of human rights should be determined by the people. It should be an inclusive concept realized in local context If we look at the universal declaration on its face this declaration does not limit human rights obligations to states by stating in the preamble that every individual and every organ of society has a role to play in promoting and respecting human rights Nevertheless, the premise of the document and the treaties that have followed since is that states hold the obligations when it comes to human rights As Professor Anaim pointed out in the lecture the imperial European nation state seems to have taken the model of state centric legality as imperative for the realization of public goods and as forcefully demonstrated this state centric approach frequently fails to protect human rights I cannot but fully agree human rights should not be state centric. They should be people centered idea. Human rights should be about the empowerment of people. And that brings me to my first question of rather practical nature which I would like to invite Professor Anaim to reflect upon. Because the question is how? How do we achieve a people centered alternative to the enforcement of human rights? Of course, I don't think anyone can disagree with the need to put people at the center of human rights protection. It brings to mind the excellent work of Professor Sally Engel-Merry of anthropology at New York University School of Law She addresses the interplay between local culture and transnational ideas and politics in the field of gender violence and in her work she demonstrates how challenging the intertwining of the local and global spaces in practice actually can be. So how do we avoid the participation of only the elite? How do we protect the weaker party against the stronger, more vocal party? And how and who will punish a breach of a human rights norm? The alternative Professor Anaim proposes in his paper is an alternative to enforcement. And a matter of enforcement is the second issue I would like to address. As has been made crystal clear the nations, the state centric approach to human rights falls short of offering protection. And it's not difficult to find many, many examples of this, the refugee crisis was already referred to. But this does beg the question of what exactly is meant when we talk about enforcement of human rights. In your paper you refer to the controversial and very problematic issue of humanitarian intervention. But enforcement surely doesn't only involve and tell the use of force. Because isn't the human rights supervisory landscape more refined? Human rights are clearly under enforced. But shouldn't we conceptualize enforcement in this field as a process of interaction, interpretation and internalization of these norms? It is clear it goes beyond saying that the UN supervisory mechanisms suffer from serious shortcomings. But certain developments in the human rights supervisory landscape have in my mind started to make small but inroads into addressing some of the shortcomings of the state centric approach. In light of the time I will just mention a few of these developments and I look forward to hearing the reflections by Professor Anaim. Firstly, as is typical for law in general, human rights law is reactive. But we can distinguish certain preemptive developments and in this respect I especially would like to point out the work of the inter-American system for the protection of human rights, where we see that a lot has been done in the field of prevention, early warning, urgent action and so on. Secondly, despite a lot of many flaws we also see an increasing emphasis on participation by NGOs and individuals in the international supervisory mechanism. And as a commissioner at the National Human Rights Institute here in the Netherlands I would also like to point out that layer of human rights supervision, national human rights institutions being a link between the national and the international level. And finally returning to the idea of Montesquieu among others, about the separation of powers, what about the role of judiciary in the process of enforcing human rights. Be that as it may, I do fully agree with Professor Anaim that the protection of human rights clearly leaves a lot to be desired. But the inadequacy of the state-centric enforcement paradigm and advocate a paradigm shift towards a people-centered alternative to the current state-centric approach. And in doing this you focus on the relationship between the citizen and the state, and the state being both a protector and a potential violator of human rights laws. And that brings me to my final point which concerns my own research and interest, business and human rights. As I said, I would argue that we need to conceptualise power beyond political power to include economic power. Power has fragmented, and just to illustrate this point, the revenues of General Motors are more than the GDP of 148 countries. Walmart's revenues are larger than the combined GDP of all sub-Saharan Africa. These powerful corporations constitute a significant threat to human dignity. In other words, when we address the issue of human rights protection shouldn't we move beyond the state? That raises a very fundamental question where in light of the problems posed by economic globalization, human rights actually is the appropriate language to be using. Have human rights or can they actually create a discourse that creates solidarity across borders? Let's take the example of the movement to improve labour conditions. A lot has clearly improved from the times when slavery was considered normal and not that long ago children were set to work here in European countries. But clearly, currently the discourse of human rights is not yet persuasive enough to change corporate behaviour, to persuade corporate actors to act humanely and to improve the conditions of workers in other parts of the globe. You might wonder whether the language of human rights also connects us globally when it concerns challenges posed by economic globalization. Or should we conclude that there might be other languages that might be more appropriate? In any case, if we do stick to human rights law it is clear that the fragmentation of power forces us to further reconsider the boundaries between the public and the private. In fact, we can no longer maintain that only states can claim rights and discharge of obligations under international human rights law. Multinational corporations are already in fact participants in the international human rights system. Human rights are not only a concept or an idea, there is an increasing body, material body of legal decisions and cases and corporations use the system. They use the regime of human rights, they don't take human rights as an idea. There are particular rules and regulations principles of interpretation and so on that multinationals can and do go in and out of. That corporations bring cases to the European Court of Human Rights claiming that their human rights have been violated. That's what I would argue, what I would advocate is what we really need is a paradigm shift regarding the duty bearers on the international human rights law. There is a need to include corporations as bearers of human rights obligations. Finally, if we look at the field of business in human rights, I see an interesting parallel with the call of Professor Anandim to move beyond the state's centric paradigm. It is in this field that we can witness a careful move away from traditional international law solutions towards what may be called experimental governance or polish centric governance. This refers to the coexistence of several different regulatory regimes around the same issue without a clear hierarchy. No one entity holds the sole rulemaking power. We increasingly see initiatives aimed at regulating corporate impact on human rights and it involves many different actors both in the design of the regulation and its supervision and it sometimes does not involve the state. But it does include those that are the object of the regulation corporations themselves. Okay, so this brings me to the end of my reflections and I think I've already taken up quite some time so I look forward to hearing the reactions by Professor Anandim. Thank you again for your lecture and I look forward to the discussion also with the audience. Thank you.