Lloyd Cutler Lecture

Illiberal Human Rights?

Recent years have witnessed significant new challenges to the postwar international system of human rights by coalitions of illiberal actors. Rather than simply opposing the language and institutions of human rights, these nascent right-wing populist, religious, and authoritarian leaders seek to promote their programs by actively appropriating human-rights language, concepts, and institutions, and to recast them in illiberal ways. In this talk, Gráinne de Búrca maps out two recent sets of ideological developments and traces how they have sought to reconfigure the postwar international human-rights order into an illiberal rights regime. She also discusses a number of counter-strategies to resist such illiberal drift and robustly defend the international human-rights system.

Gráinne de Búrca is Florence Ellinwood Allen Professor of Law at New York University, where she is also director of the Hauser Global Law School and co-director of the Jean Monnet Center. Búrca is author of Reframing Human Rights in a Turbulent Era (Oxford, 2021), and co-author, with Paul Craig, of the Oxford University Press textbook EU Law, currently in its seventh edition. A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Búrca is co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Constitutional Law and serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law and Global Constitutionalism and Legal Studies.