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Bernstein Symposium

The Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Symposium, will take place on March 23-24 in Room 127 at the Yale Law School. See complete program below.

Religion and Human Rights

One of the most interesting developments of the opening years of the millennium has been the resurgence of interest in the role of religious belief and practice in global affairs. Scholars have given up any easy assumption that religion would increasingly be displaced by secularism. Politicians have had to learn how to respond to new forms of religious activism. And globalists have had to reconsider how religious belief continues to shape the possibilities of change within borders and across regions. Some scholars have responded to these developments by reevaluating the role of religion in the origins of modern human rights law. Some practitioners have responded by trying to marshal the power of faith communities to a human rights agenda. Scholars and practitioners have often focused on ways to protect human rights from opposition by religious communities that perceive the human rights project as secular, Western or cosmopolitan. This year’s Bernstein Symposium will address, in three different panels, the complex relationships between human rights and religion.
 

THURSDAY

12:00 PM        A Conversation with Current Bernstein and Robina Foundation Human Rights Fellows

Bernstein Fellows:
Daniel Hessel ’16, EarthRights International, Thailand
Asaf Lubin (L.L.M. ’15, J.S.D. ’18), Privacy International, London

Robina Fellows:
Tosin Agbabiaka ’16, USAID/Power Africa
Sergio Giuliano (L.L.M. 2016), European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France
Andrea Scoseria Katz, ’16, European Court of Human Rights, France


4:15 PM     Keynote Address: Why Human Rights Needs Religion

Larry Cox, Co-Director, Kairos: The Center on Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary, and former Executive Director, Amnesty International USA

 

FRIDAY
10:00-12:00     New Perspectives on the Role of Religion in the History of Human Rights

The field of human rights as an identifiable set of institutions, practices and beliefs has now been around long enough to support a field of historical inquiry. Some of the work of the new historians of human rights challenges old assumptions about the place of religion in human rights, including in their origins. The first panel will look to new understandings of religious perspectives on the history of human rights and to the significance of debates about this history for the contemporary relationship between religion and human rights.

  • Sarah Azaransky, Assistant Professor of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary
  • Zareena Grewal, Associate Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies, Yale University
  • Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Professor of Missions & World Christianity, Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies, Yale University
  • Suzanne Stone, University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
  • Samuel Moyn, Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History, Harvard University (moderator)
     

1:00-2:30                 Religion as a Human Right

Religion figures in diverse ways in human rights, including as a set of protected beliefs and practices: Individuals have a human right to hold their religious beliefs and to freely practice their religion. In this panel, we examine how this right informs policies of governments and of international organizations. When governments pursue protection for religion, they are always in danger of being judged against a colonial legacy that included proselytizing. How do governments and international institutions negotiate this history as they implement policies that seek to protect religious practices around the world?

  • David N. Saperstein, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom
     
  • Anna Su, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Law
  • Patrick Weil, Visiting Professor of Law, Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Senior Fellow, and Senior Research Scholar in Law, Yale Law School
     
  • Paul W. Kahn, Robert W. Winner Professor of law and the Humanities (moderator)
     

2:45-4:15    Advocating for Gender Equality and Reproductive Rights in the Face of Religion-Based Resistance

Religion is notable both as a human right worthy of protection and, sometimes, as a claim against the demands of human rights. Human rights advocates often find themselves confronting an opposition asserting the authority of religious orthodoxy. In this last panel, we will examine, through the lens of advocacy for gender equality and reproductive rights, the ways in which religious communities encounter human rights.

  • Karima Bennoune, U.N. Special Rapporteur in the Field of Cultural Eights and Professor of Law, U.C. Davis School of Law
     
  • Debora Diniz, Professor, Law Faculty, University of Brasília and founder of Anis: Institute of Bioethics, Human Rights and Gender
     
  • Louise Melling, Deputy Legal Director and Director of Center for Liberty, ACLU. She formerly directed the Reproductive Freedom Project. She now oversees women’s rights, reproductive freedom, LGBT and freedom of religion and belief
     
  • Hope R. Metcalf, Executive Director, Schell Center for International Human Rights (moderator)
     

4:15-4:45     Closing Reflections: Competing Universalisms?

Richard Amesbury, Professor of Theological Ethics, University of Zurich
 

4:45      Reception and Introduction of the 2017-2018 Bernstein and Robina Fellows (Alumni Reading Room)