Human Rights, Poverty and Capitalism

Anna Chadwick will examine the inter play between state obligations to eradicate extreme poverty and realize socio economic rights under International Human Rights Law and some of the legal regimes and economic paradigms that sustain global capitalism. Advocates of rights based solutions to poverty tend to focus on how mechanisms to advance relevant categories of human rights, above all socio economic rights, can be strengthened. Their analyses typically ignore questions of how other legal rights and legal regimes may function as obstacles to the eradication of poverty and the realization of human rights. Anna contests the long standing assumption of IHRL that the goal of realizing human rights and socio economic rights in particular is compatible with the operations of global capitalism and she seeks to demonstrate that the legal regimes necessary to sustain capitalist political economy are, in fact, routinely productive of poverty and of violations of socio economic rights.

Speaker

Anna Chadwick is a Lecturer in Law working in International Law and Legal Theory at the University of Glasgow. She first joined the School of Law as a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith (LKAS) Fellow in 2017, after completing a two-year Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute, in Florence. Anna’s principal research interests lie at the intersection between law and markets. Her PhD research explored the role of commodity derivatives speculation in the context of the 2007-11 global food crisis and offered a critical assessment of attempts to use financial regulation as a means to curb excessive levels of speculation in derivatives markets. Anna’s subsequent work has investigated the relationships between law and processes of financialisation in the global economy, the significance of contract law in the development of new financial instruments, and the role of public international law and international economic law in contributing to the production of food insecurity. Her monograph, Law and the Political Economy of Hunger, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2019.

Registration: https://www.uva.nl/en/forms/subsites/amsterdam-center-for-international-law/en/register
Additional information: https://www.uva.nl/en/shared-content/subsites/amsterdam-center-for-international-law/en/events/lectures/2020/11/human-rights-poverty-and-capitalism