Born from a course held in April 2021, the book “Interdisciplinary debates on law and human rights: impasses, risks and challenges” appears as a reference
In April 2021, Unicamp's Executive Directorate of Human Rights (DeDH), through an agreement with the Public Ministry of Labor of the 15th Region, offered the course “International Human Rights Law”. This course resulted in the collection of articles that make up the book “Interdisciplinary debates on law and human rights: impasses, risks and challenges”, 5th volume of the Jurema Collection. With 37 articles – most of them unpublished –, the publication is multidisciplinary in nature and deepens the discussion on the points of contact between Law and human rights. “The book was created as a reference by bringing together knowledge from various areas and the best we have on the issue of human rights”, says professor Silvia Santiago, director of DeDH.
The course that gave rise to the book was organized in partnership with the Research Group on Democracy, Law and Memory of the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA) at USP (GPDH/IEA-USP), with the Institute of Public Policies and International Relations at Unesp (IPPRI-Unesp) and the Center for Contemporary Culture Studies (CEDEC). Researchers, professors and students of the course are the authors of the articles, divided into five main lines, which discuss social and labor rights, women and intersectionality, poverty and democracy and the role of judicial and political institutions. Recent problems are also addressed, such as the foreign policy for human rights under the Jair Bolsonaro government and the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the population in situations of socioeconomic vulnerability.
The volume was organized by professors Andrei Koerner, Paulo César Endo and Carla Cristina Vreche. According to Koerner, the themes of the articles were selected according to two criteria: offering training in human rights for professionals and law students and bringing together professors from the three universities in São Paulo. “The book proposes approaches and themes that are not usual in the training of Law graduates. The University has the role of offering something innovative, which goes beyond the methods and themes usually worked on”, he says.
In the collection, errors in public policies – or the lack of them – are highlighted, and thus, it functions as a kind of denunciation. “It is an acute, sensitive reflection on human rights in the world today”, highlights Santiago. According to the professor, human rights have been infringed for almost three centuries, but are currently disregarded in a specific social and production context, in which exclusion and income concentration are normalized. “We often say: the world is like that. It is not! We are the ones who chose for him to be like this”, she warns.
As Kate Nash pointed out, author of one of the articles epProfessor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, activists and researchers in Human Rights are those who bother, who raise questions about neglected topics, given the lack of attention in the routines of organizations, the naturalization of oppressive social relations and the convenient silences among those who exercise power or who oppose the human rights of routine way. “The state human rights policies promoted by federal secretariats and ministries until 2016 played this role and, therefore, were dismantled, dismantled, by the last governments”, concludes Koerner.
The book can be downloaded for free at this link.
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