Human Rights Under Siege in the Age of AI
Notes & Changes
This event will take place in the Sir Joseph Hotung Auditorium, and online via Zoom. For online attendance, please view the livestream here.
About the event
Human rights are under siege everywhere, now facing special threats from global authoritarianism, pandemics, climate change, and artificial intelligence. In his lecture, a longtime human rights scholar and policymaker asks: “What should those committed to the preservation and promotion of human rights do at such a challenging moment?”
About the speaker
Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law and former Dean at Yale Law School, where he has taught since 1980. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford and a former US Supreme Court clerk, he has since served four US presidents over five decades in various positions, including Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and Senior Adviser and Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State in the Biden and Obama administrations. He is recipient of 18 honorary degrees, and the author of 10 books and over 275 published articles. He has represented numerous countries before international tribunals, including the International Court of Justice, and has appeared frequently before the Supreme Court of the United States. He has received awards from Columbia and Duke law schools, the Judge Robert A Katzmann Award for academic excellence, and the American Bar Association for his lifetime achievements in international law. A Marshall scholar, he graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, of which he is currently an Honorary Fellow, and has served as a Fellow at All Souls and Balliol Colleges, as well as George Eastman visiting professor at Oxford, Arthur Goodhart visiting professor of law at Cambridge, and Visiting Fellow of Oxford’s Bonavero human rights Institute. His most last two books are “The National Security Constitution in the 21st century” (Yale 2024) and “The Trump Administration and International Law” (Oxford 2019).
Chair
Kate O'Regan is the inaugural Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a former judge of the South African Constitutional Court (1994 – 2009). In the mid-1980s she practiced as a lawyer in Johannesburg in a variety of fields, but especially labour law and land law, representing many of the emerging trade unions and their members, as well as communities threatened with eviction under apartheid land laws. In 1990, she joined the Faculty of Law at UCT where she taught a range of courses including race, gender and the law, labour law, civil procedure and evidence. Since her fifteen-year term at the South African Constitutional Court ended in 2009, she has amongst other things served as an ad hoc judge of the Supreme Court of Namibia (from 2010 - 2016), Chairperson of the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry into allegations of police inefficiency and a breakdown in trust between the police and the community of Khayelitsha (2012 – 2014), and as a member of the boards or advisory bodies of many NGOs working in the fields of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and equality.