Thank you very much for these warm words of welcome, words of introduction. Thanks to

all of you for showing an interest in this presentation, which of course should be followed

by an intensive and open discussion. I'm always looking forward to the discussion mainly,

but okay, now first of all maybe 40 minutes, 45 minutes of lecture. I understand this institution

is very much interested in exploring future, the dimension of future, prophecy, prognoses,

and that's why I maybe have chosen the title, the future of human rights at stake, question mark.

I have attended many workshops on the future of human rights, but usually this was more about,

I mean how to respond to new developments, technological developments, new surveillance

technologies for instance, genetic enhancement, how to secure privacy or elements of privacy in

the era of the internet, how to consolidate the institutional framework of human rights

protection, many, many things, more practical things about how precisely human rights should

develop. This is not the subject of today's presentation here. Now the question that I'm

going to address is a much more radical one. It's not about future developments, but about

the question of whether the whole project of human rights will have a future, any future.

And I mean this is actually in response to a new wave of literature, to say that in brackets,

dystopia may not be the adequate term, but okay, radical criticism of human rights. It's a wave of

recent literature. What you see here on the whiteboard, End Times of Human Rights, is without

the question mark a book title. It's a book, a very prominent book, very much feature, broadly

featured by Stephen Hopgood. And what, I mean his message is the following, let me quote,

we are living through the end times of the civilizing mission. The prospects of one world

under secular human rights law is receding. What seemed like a dawn is in fact a sunset.

What seemed like a dawn maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago, actually a little bit longer ago,

with the end of communism, the fall of the Iron Curtain, many people were hoping that now human

rights would define the common denominator across cultures, across cultural divides,

religious divide, political, ideological, geographical, and that now the human rights

projects, the institutionalization of respect for human dignity would steadily grow, would become

stronger step by step, and so become a broadly consolidated project of humanity as a whole.

The dawn, not that long ago, and now what he says in his book, The End Times of Human Rights,

no question mark. What seemed like a dawn is in fact a sunset. So maybe Hopgood is one of those

prophets of doom or gloom. He's not alone in that business. Let me just name a few book titles

without naming the authors, recent book titles published by well-established academic publishing

houses like Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, and others. So for

instance, The Myth of Universal Human Rights, a radical deconstruction of the whole enterprise.

The debasement of human rights, the twilight of human rights law. I could actually go on. It's

a long list that really amounts to a wave of radical deconstructions. Now I'm having been in

that publishing business myself for a number of years. I'm not inclined to take academic

publications too seriously. But at the same time, one should not disregard them because at least

they may also fulfill a seismographic function. I mean, say they can also tell something that is

in the air and also indicate new developments that deserve also to be taken seriously or deserve to

be noted. A common denominator within that new wave of supercritical literature is the charge

of hubris. I mean not hubris within human rights. I mean that is a given. Of course, I mean human

rights people can be very complacent. I have a lot of experience with that. They can be very self

assertive and a little bit arrogant. I mean that's really human nature. Don't be surprised to see

that happening. But I mean here the charge is the very project is a manifestation of hubris, human

rights as hubris. So again, a few quotes. Daniel Stamos speaks about the self aggrandizing

anthropocentrism within human rights. So anthropocentric hubris, the arrogance of the human species that

sets itself above other creatures. Eric Posner, I quote, with the benefit of hindsight we can see

that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism than an act of hubris with more

than a passing resemblance to the civilizing efforts undertaken by governments and missionary

groups in the 19th century. Here the charge is human rights amount to a western project, a western