Sim Peter Baehr Lecture: Ensuring human rights for all in the digital age

Thank you very much for joining us today, in this most unusual year. It is an honour to be delivering this lecture, which is part of a series named in memory of the late Peter Baehr, one of the pioneers of human rights research and activism in the Netherlands. A political scientist, Peter Baehr played an important role at Amnesty International, both in the Netherlands and internationally, and was the director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at Utrecht University from 1991 until his retirement in 1997. Following his passing in 2010, this annual SIM lecture series was renamed in his honour. I understand his family members are joining us today as well, and I would like to extend a special welcome to them: thank you for being with us today. I just referred to this year as ‘unusual’ which history may or may not judge to be the ultimate euphemism for the situation we are going through. What is certain, however, is that our current circumstances were not foreseeable when Peter Baehr was doing his important human rights work, and they were certainly not foreseeable at the time our current international human rights framework –– the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two binding treaties that followed from it, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights –– was drafted following the Second World War. Nevertheless, this human rights framework persists today, and it is proving to be as relevant as ever amidst a global pandemic and a landscape of rapid technological change, both of which are having significant impact on our human rights. We will touch upon all of these issues in this lecture.