Symposia

[Ademola Oluborode Jegede is full professor of law, and the Interim Director of the Ismail Mahomed Centre for Human and Peoples’ Rights in the School of Law, University of Venda, South Africa. He is the initiator and Convening Editor of the African Journal of Climate Law & Justice, and an External Expert to the Working Group of Children Rights and...

[Charlotte E. Blattner is senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Public Law, University of Berne. She specializes in public international law and climate law, and is the author of Protecting Animals Within and Across Jurisdiction (OUP).] Introduction For some time now, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been widely accused of its “erratic and unprincipled” case law on extraterritorial jurisdiction,...

[Angela Müller is Executive Director at AlgorithmWatch CH and heads AlgorithmWatch’s international policy team. She holds a PhD in law and an MA in Political and Economic Philosophy.] Today, opportunities for states to affect human rights abroad abound: global phenomena like organized crime, global warming, or terrorism multiply the scope of individuals a state can and does affect—at home as well as abroad. New technologies,...

[Elif Durmuş is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp in the Flemish inter-University (iBOF) project “Future-Proofing Human Rights: Developing Thicker Accountability” [grant number 42367], focusing on an inclusive reconceptualisation of duty and duty bearers in international human rights law through inspiration from other legal fields.] Why Would States and Others Have (Extraterritorial) Human Rights Obligations? The extraterritorial application of human rights obligations...

[Chief Charles A. Taku is great grandson of Asunganyi, King of the Bangwa, Counsel before International Courts and Tribunals, and Former President of the International Criminal Court Bar Association]  ‘To validate one’s heritage, to explore one’s culture, to examine thoroughly those institutions which have persisted through centuries, is perhaps the first step in a peoples’ search for independence and in their...

[Sasha Merigot is a Master's Student in Political Science at Sciences Po Paris and a graduate from Leiden University College The Hague, winning the Thesis of Merit award with the thesis on Reproducing and Re-Constructing National Identity at the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac] A key theme of Confronting Colonial Objects is the complicity of collectors, museums and racial science...

[Dr Emery Patrick Effiboley is Museologist and Art Historian, and Head of the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Abomey-Calavi (Republic of Benin). He was Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Creative Arts of Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.] Confronting Colonial Objects argues that ‘distancing, discursive silencing and erasure are common...

[Raghavi Viswanath and Jessica Wiseman are PhD candidates at the European University Institute (EUI)] In the opening chapter of his book ‘Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities, and Access to Culture’, Carsten Stahn promises to “present both the different facets of colonial violence and their enduring effects, and possible avenues to renew relations” (page 8). In the first six chapters of his...

[João Figueiredo is a research associate at the Käte Hamburger kolleg “Legal Unity and Pluralism” of the University of Münster, Germany. He researches Portuguese colonialism in Angola, using historical anthropology and legal history to shed new light on aspects of the history of the slave trade, abolitionism, and the origins of systemic racism.] Individual examples prove nothing. Still, a single case...

[Gracia Lwanzo Kasongo is a PhD researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium and a member of the Institute of Political Science Louvain-Europe (ISPOLE). She is a legal scholar and political scientist and former fellow of the American Bar Association (ABA)] 1. Introduction  In the colonialist moves to collect human remains, and the desire to demonstrate grandeur and strength,...

[Marie-Sophie de Clippele is Assistant Professor in Law at UC Louvain Saint-Louis – Bruxelles] The centrality of the human body as site of colonial violence, and its implication for contemporary restitution policies, are discussed in Chapter 5 of Confronting Colonial Objects. The book shows that human remains and natural history objects are more than objects or human biological material. It draws on the interplay between human...

[Alessandro Chechi is Senior lecturer at the University of Geneva, the Catholic University of Lille, and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights] The question of returning colonial objects that were displaced during the colonial era by European invaders is by no means a new one. Already in 1978, the then UNESCO Director-General, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, issued a ‘Plea for the Return of an Irreplaceable...