Inaugural Lecture - Professor Liora Lazarus: The Right to Security in Illiberal Times

Event Description

Right wing populists have weaponised the right to security in order to consolidate authoritarian power and legitimate repressive policies. This lecture outlines this trend, and places this form of ‘human rights populism’ in the longer history of the right to security within human rights theory, politics and law. It argues that the legitimating force of the idea of the right to security as a meta right – a right of rights - has always had within it the potential to undermine the human rights system as a whole.  The lecture argues that the arguments for such a conception of the right to security can be resisted on philosophical and legal grounds. On political grounds, the lecture criticizes the tendency within the human rights and international community to uncritically leverage the right to security as a means of advancing human rights, development and rule of law objectives.

5:00-6:00 pm - Lecture
6:00-7:00 pm - Reception

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Speaker

Liora Lazarus’ expertise sits at the interface between security, the rule of law, and human rights. She came to the Peter A. Allard School of Law in 2020 after a twenty year career at the University of Oxford. During her time at Oxford she was Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Fellow in Law at St. Anne's College, and Associate Professor in Law. She remains a Supernumerary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and was recognized as Professor in Human Rights Law at Oxford in October 2020.