Sim Peter Baehr Lecture: Ensuring human rights for all in the digital age
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0924051920971956 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Lecture |
Lecture
Sim Peter Baehr Lecture:
Ensuring human rights
for all in the digital age
Nani Jansen Reventlow
Founding Director, Digital Freedom Fund
Annual SIM Peter Baehr Lecture, 16 October 2020
1
Thank you very much for joining us today, in this most unusual year. It is an honour to be
delivering this lecture, which is part of a series named in memory of the late Peter Baehr, one
of the pioneers of human rights research and activism in the Netherlands. A political scientist, Peter
Baehr played an important role at Amnesty International, both in the Netherlands and internation-
ally, and was the director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at Utrecht University
from 1991 until his retirement in 1997. Following his passing in 2010, this annual SIM lecture
series was renamed in his honour. I understand his family members are joining us today as well,
and I would like to extend a special welcome to them: thank you for being with us today.
I just referred to this year as ‘unusual’ which history may or may not judge to be the ultimate
euphemism for the situation we are going through. What is certain, however, is that our current
circumstances were not foreseeable when Peter Baehr was doing his important human rights work,
and they were certainly not foreseeable at the time our current international human rights frame-
work –– the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two binding treaties that followed
from it, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the InternationalCovenant on
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights –– was drafted following the Second World War. Neverthe-
less, this human rights framework persists today, and it is proving to be as relevant as ever amidst a
global pandemic and a landscape of rapid technological change, both of which are having signif-
icant impact on our human rights.
We will touch upon all of these issues in this lecture.
Corresponding author:
Nani Jansen Reventlow, Founding Director, Digital Freedom Fund.
Email: hello@nanijansen.org
1. The SIM Peter Baehr Lecture is held every year at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, to celebrate the founding of the
Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) in 1981 and to commemorate the late professor Peter Baehr, one of its
former directors.
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights
2020, Vol. 38(4) 302–311
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0924051920971956
journals.sagepub.com/home/nqh
NQHR
NQHR
To continue reading
Request your trial