Human Rights Issues in Europe

Course content

This is a legal course in international human rights law that centres on a close scrutiny of actual cases in mapping and discussing issues of human rights in western Europe. As a theme ``human rights`` is usually associated with somewhat peripheral political cultures in which the civil society is typically weak and grievances abound due to partisan, patriarchal or discriminating uses of public authority. The present course focuses instead on democracies in western Europe that seem rarely suspect in this regard, stretching from the UK, France and Germany to Iceland and Norway, from Spain and Italy, to Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ireland.