LLM 880STopics: Human Rights: Current Issues and Challenges

This course will address current issues in human rights arising at the national, regional and international level. The initial class session will familiarize participants with key human rights standards and their implementation and enforcement through international, regional and national institutions and by non-governmental organizations. The remainder of the course will examine selected rights from a comparative perspective through the examination of a series of high-profile and often controversial cases in the courts taken from well-established centers of jurisprudence such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom Supreme Courts. The course also considers the relationship between development and human rights through the scrutiny of the work of inter-governmental organizations, such as the World Bank, as well as non-governmental organizations in upholding or failing to uphold international human rights standards.