Thank you, Christophe, for that introduction.

And thank you very much for inviting me to present on whether we are in a post-human

rights era.

It is an absolute privilege to be at this event in historic Nuremberg together with

so many outstanding human rights scholars and practitioners.

So what does it mean to say or to think about whether we are in a post-human rights era?

I think in many ways the human rights era is in full swing, and that's fantastic.

Despite many recent setbacks, including the rise of repressive regimes, democratic backsliding,

attacks on minorities, it is important to recall that we are living in a period of the

global expansion of human rights protections on many issues in many countries.

Just to take a few examples, in many places in the world, the legal rights of women, people

with disabilities, people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual are better than

at any time in modern history.

And the human rights movement, the data tells us, is at least partially responsible for

those great successes.

In that sense, thankfully, we are not in a post-human rights world.

The moral foundations upon which human rights rest are not in the past.

That foundation is more important than ever, and we are certainly not in a post-human rights

world in that sense.

The need for human rights is acute.

More specifically, however, in terms of global international law and human rights, I am arguing,

I put forth for you the argument that we are in what you might call a post-human rights

period and, even more controversially, that that might actually be, in certain senses,

a good thing.

In its golden age, human rights purported not just to ensure rights through treaties

and customary international law, but also to transform and expand the basic foundations

of international law itself.

That transformation and expansion has mostly failed, and where it has succeeded, I think

in places there are reasons to think it may have been unwise.

That is the sense in which I am arguing that we may be in a post-human rights era.

I will talk both about the transformative project and the expansionist project of human

rights.

As my introduction suggested, my comments are about global human rights, and I am not

talking about regional human rights arrangements, to which I will return at the end.

The transformative project of human rights attempted to redefine sovereignty itself around

human rights and as a responsibility towards individuals and their universally acknowledged

entitlements.

That conceptual transformation had many important effects for doctrines of international law.

The doctrinal changes were designed to facilitate the coercive enforcement of many human rights.

Included in this framework are limitations on state immunity, universal jurisdiction,

a purported right to democracy, a right to remedial secession, humanitarian intervention,

responsibility to protect.

These innovations limit the protections afforded to sovereigns, and the changes were based

on the conceptual redefinition of sovereignty as only legitimate to the extent it reflects

popular choice and to the extent it protects and promotes individual human rights.

It's a very normatively appealing way of thinking about what it means to be sovereign.

The traditional understanding of sovereignty affords all sovereign states exclusive control

over their territory and includes the principles of sovereign immunity, domestic jurisdiction,

and non-intervention.

This move, this conceptual move from the traditional to the human rights-based understanding of