SIM Peter Baehr Lecture – Life Begins at Forty: Human Rights for the Future

Abstract

Distinguished participants, dear students, I am pleased to join you today in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Utrecht University’s Human Rights Centre. This celebration comes at a challenging time, when we are facing global threats to human rights across the globe. COVID-19 has shown us a world immersed in human rights gaps – and it has made them deeper and wider. The pandemic has exposed the weaknesses of political, economic and health systems, and laid bare systemic discrimination and deep structural inequalities everywhere, both within and between countries. At the same time, our world continues to suffer with climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. This triple planetary crisis created and sustained by human action – and inaction – is also directly and severely impacting a broad range of rights, including the rights to adequate food, water, education, housing, health, development, and even life itself. One of the greatest uncertainties about these challenges is what policymakers will do about them. Earlier this year I told the United Nations Human Rights Council that ‘navigating a clear way out of the complex COVID-19 crisis, and towards an inclusive, green, sustainable and resilient future, will be the work of this generation of world leaders – or their downfall.’ So, in the midst of so many threats to human lives, livelihoods and rights, allow me to share with you some thoughts on how grave they are – and, on how, together, we can overcome them. Recent months have unleashed extreme and murderous climate events on people in every region of the world: monumental fires in Siberia and California; huge sudden floods in China, Germany