‘Utopias and Promises of Human Rights’, Australian Journal of Human Rights 22.2 (2016)

Under the editorship of Dr Benjamin Authers, member of the UUN, a special issue on the ‘Utopias and Promises of Human Rights’ of the Australian Journal of Human Rights was published. Authers wrote the Introduction, and the issue contains articles by Barnita Bagchi (on South Asian women’s agency, utopia, and human rights), Eve Darian-Smith (Decolonising Utopia), Rachel Hughes (victim participation at Cambodia’s hybrid tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia), Terri Tomsky (literary representations of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia), Eliza Garnsey (visual jurisprudence in South Africa’s Constitutional Court), Robert Leckey (judicial rituals by which judges delay the coming into effect of their conclusion that a law violates human rights), Margaret Hughes (material subjects and vital objects — prefiguring property and rights for an entangled world), and Ben Golder (nostalgia, utopia, and human rights).

The Special Issue arose out an international workshop convened in August 2015 at the Australian National University, Canberra, by Dr Authers as part of the the ARC Laureate Fellowship project led by Hilary Charlesworth, ‘Strengthening the international human rights regime: Rights, regulation, and ritualism’.