Sally Merry to Visit CIGJ
Sally Merry, Adjunct Professor at RegNet and Professor of Anthropology in the Institute for Law and Society at New York University, returns to the CIGJ in March. Sally is the author (with Mark Goodale) of The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local and of Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Her work highlights what she describes as ‘the vernacularisation’ of rights, or how international human rights are interpreted and realised at the local level.
Visiting PhD Scholarships Reminder
A reminder to PhD scholars that applications for visiting scholarships at the Centre, close at the end of this month.
The ASEAN Human Rights Declaration – Cause for Celebration?
Civil society organisations have long advocated for a regional Human Rights mechanism for South East Asia. Their efforts were finally rewarded on the 18 November 2012, with the Phnom Penh Statement heralding the adoption of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. But is the Declaration really cause for celebration? It has been ridiculed by many activists, and greeted with only cautious optimism by others. Next week, ‘Regarding Rights’ publishes commentary on the Declaration by two scholars very well acquainted with the debate over the ASEAN Declaration: Dr Imelda Deinla, a postdoctoral fellow at RegNet, ANU, and Catherine Renshaw, a research fellow at UNSW’s Australian Human Rights Centre. Imelda has worked on human rights capacity building in the Asia Pacific (as International Programs Coordinator, Diplomacy Training Program, Faculty of Law, UNSW), and she also worked for many years as a corporate and litigation lawyer in the Philippines, where she was involved in research, advocacy, and litigation involving violence against women and children, including cases involving the military. Catherine is Director of the Human Rights Centre’s project, ‘Building Human Rights in the Region through Horizontal Transnational Networks: the Role of the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions’.
Regarding Rights 