The Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Symposium will be held March 23–24, 2017. This year’s symposium will address the complex relationships between human rights and religion. According to organizers, the resurgence of interest in the role of religious belief and practice in global affairs “is one of the most interesting developments of the opening years of the millennium.”
Professor Lamin Sanneh will be participating in a panel on “New Perspectives on the Role of Religion in the History of Human Rights” at 10AM on Friday March 24. In this panel, participants will look to new understandings of religious perspectives on the history of human rights and to the significance of debates about this history for the contemporary relationship between religion and human rights.The field of human rights as an identifiable set of institutions, practices and beliefs has now been around long enough to support a field of historical inquiry. Some of the work of the new historians of human rights challenges old assumptions about the place of religion in human rights, including in their origins.
More information can be found on the Bernstein Symposium’s website.