By Brendan Sweeney
Isi Foighel Day, which is organised each year by DIHR, the Isi Foighel-Day Committee, and the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs celebrates the memory of the renowned human rights lawyer, Professor Isi Foighel. 140 invited guests attended the lecture which took place at the headquarters of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Copenhagen.
Professor Foighel, who fled to Sweden from Nazi persecution as a child, was a judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg where he helped to establish the agenda for the way more than 40 European countries treat their citizens.
Prior to Professor’s lecture there was a short introduction by the Director of DIHR, Dr Jonas Christoffersen, who first met Isi Foighel when he was a law student, and a brief talk by the head of DIHR Research Department, Eva Maria Lassen,
Professor Nowak – who has been the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment since 2004 - began his lecture by explaining why the Swiss Initiative on the Agenda for Human Rights was so important, and how the Agenda is developing [see link on right]. He then outlined some of the major problems facing human rights across the globe, including the lack of political leadership and the gap between the high aspirations of the human rights movement and the sobering realities which face it.
Because of the ‘war on terror’ the last decade had been a lost decade as far as human rights was concerned, he said. Rather than striving to eliminate poverty across the world, the international community had tended to react to terrorist attacks, increasing the conflict between North and South and creating a new kind of cold war.
Professor Nowak reiterated Kofi Annan’s proposal for better interlinking between international peace and security, development and human rights. “There can be no development without security, no security without development but no security or development without human rights,” he said.
After detailing the current state of human rights in the world, Professor Nowak, argued for the establishment of a world court of human rights. Such a court would be able to make binding judgements on individual complaints against states, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and non-state actors based on existing human rights treaties, and provide victims with the right to adequate reparations.
He proposed that a world court of human rights would be able to strengthen domestic judgement systems and create a principle of complementarity. It could be established based a statute similar to that of the International Criminal Court (ICC) without the necessity of treaty amendments, he said, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights could supervise implementation.
After the lecture By Professor Nowak, there was a short question and answer session followed by a film featuring Isi Foighel and a talk by Professor Foighel’s widow, Edit Moltke-Leth.
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