Thank you, Catherine.

It is really a pleasure for me to be here, and thank you to the organizers of this conference.

It's great to see that there are many students of the master's program here and that there

is a concerted effort in Nuremberg between the university and the mayor's office to

make or consolidate Nuremberg as a space for reflection and action on human rights.

That's very much needed these days for the reasons that my colleagues in previous panels

have made abundantly clear.

But it is one thing to say that we need responses to human rights challenges and it's quite

a different thing to do something about that and to invest the amount of energy, time,

and talent that it takes to develop and to build an institution and a program like the

ones that you all are continuing to build through the master's program to the Center

for Human Rights.

And I'm particularly glad to see that my dear friend Catherine has joined this effort

and that you all are part of it.

So today I was asked to do a forward-looking reflection on human rights, the future of

human rights, reimagining human rights, and I'm going to do that through the lens of a

five-year action research project that I've been conducting with human rights advocates

and scholars that have participated in a series of 12 workshops in different parts of the

world.

About 300 NGO leaders and extras from different fields have come together around the question

of whether there is a crisis or a transition in human rights, whether the field is in a

moment of crisis or whether it's a moment of transition.

And in the context of running those workshops in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle

East, in Southeast Asia, South Asia, North America, Europe, I've come to the conclusion

that – which was – it's not surprising coming from an activist that there isn't

a terminal crisis of human rights, but this is not a common moment, any moment of transition

either.

And it's very fitting that we're discussing this issue or this possible diagnosis of the

moment in Nuremberg, because if there was one moment of paradigmatic transition, a moment

in which clearly there was an inflection point in human rights practice and activism, like

as Catherine Sikking has beautifully documented in her book Evidence for Hope, was in the

post-Second World War moment in which Nuremberg had such an importance, as we all know.

I think that we're in a similar moment, and the book that I'm completing, the book

manuscript that I'm completing is called Disrupting Human Rights.

And it starts with the argument, with the conclusion that there is a paradigm shift

in human rights activism, that we don't know, as Thomas Kuhn wrote in his classic

work on paradigm transitions in science, we do not know yet what the new paradigm or the

new tools or the new concepts will be, but we do know, and this is what I tried to document

in the book, that there are enough signs that the old tools, for example naming and shaming

strategies, the usual ways of conducting human rights activism with mostly law-centered tools,

through formal organizations of the type of the classic NGOs, that all of that is continuing

to be relevant, but will not do the trick under the conditions of the 21st century.

And that the reason why, and this is exciting for students and scholars and activists alike,

the reason why we're seeing that so many questions, fundamental questions of human

rights practice and also scholarship are being opened up for debate is because that's one

of the markers of paradigmatic transitions.

These days some of the most interesting discussions in these workshops that we ran for the last

five years had to do with who counts as a human rights actor.

What type of rights holders should we include in the arsenal, in the architecture of human

rights activism?