So good evening everyone and thank you very much Anoushey for that very very kind introduction.

It's really an honor and also a pleasure to deliver this keynote lecture this evening

on the occasion of the annual conference on comparative constitutional law of the world

law journal and I'd like to thank Anoushey for extending me this invitation but also

to the Center for Human Rights in Erlangen and Nuremberg and also the World Comparative

Law Journal for this invitation as well.

It was a warm day and I think it's getting a little bit cooler so maybe that's to the

advantage of this keynote lecture today.

So I titled this keynote lecture comparative human rights law origins and expansion.

So let me first explain why why this title.

If you ask me which subfield of human rights research has really bloomed and really developed

in the past decade or so I actually will say that this is really the scholarship on comparative

human rights law.

We have seen a massive flurry of research and quite a lot of publications on this field

and that's why I wanted to focus on this in the in this lecture and also I wanted to just

offer an account or my account of the story of expansion of comparative human rights law.

So what I'd like to do in the in the lecture is to show that the comparative field of human

rights law has come to cover more ground over time.

It has become very multifaceted and very complex as well over time and it has really expanded

our horizons as to what we compare and why we compare.

And I think this sort of blooming field has also had some very important effects about

what we talk about when we talk about human rights law.

So this is more of a not just a comparative insight but maybe it has also expanded our

theoretical horizons when we talk about human rights and its law more specifically.

And I do want to focus on this expansion because I think it will have quite a lot of consequences

for research for many years to come.

So I don't think this expansion was there and it stopped but I think it's actually a

trajectory that will probably continue for many years to come.

There's also one other aspect of this expansion of comparative human rights law and I think

that this expansion also transformed us as human rights law researchers.

So I think there is an aspect about it about self identity who identifies as a human rights

scholar who names and says you know I do this is the area that I actually do research on

and I think it also transformed us in the sense that I would say that we all have a

very good sense that it's not enough to know about only one context or only one jurisdiction

or one regional system or one human rights treaty to actually say you know I'm a human

rights law scholar.

We're acutely aware that there are lots of other things out there so it pushes us to

know but also be a bit aware of you know our limitations and I think it has also made us

a lot more curious about comparisons in many more years to come.

So overall my expansion story or my take on the expansion of comparative human rights

law is a very positive one.

I think it's a good thing that this field has expanded.

So I find this expansion very positive for both research and scholarship on human rights

law but also for the practice of human rights law.

So I think the effects was not just about what we do as researchers but also out in

the world the practice of human rights law has become a lot more rich through the expansion

of comparative human rights law.

And I think this expansion is also very very significant for something that I value very

much and I think comparative human rights law has also started to break silos between

various disciplines in particular the silo between comparative constitutional rights