REFLECTIONS-8 OCTOBER 21

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REPORT ON WEBINAR ON INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW HELD ON THE 8TH DAY OF OCTOBER 2021

The webinar started at about 6pm with Mr. Evan Verploegh, program manager, welcoming attendees to the webinar and reiterating the purpose of the webinar series. He then went on to introduce the speaker for the day in the person of Brian Tonic, Counsel at Perseus Strategies, Washington DC.

Mr. Brian then started off by outlining International law sources which are treaties and customary law. His emphasis was then on the treaties which he said evolved and kept evolving after the end of the second world war in 1945 with the first being the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945 and then the Genocide Convention of 1951 and the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 1969 and consequently the International Covenants amongst other treaties if the United Nations.

He also highlighted Regional Human Rights Treaties like European Convention on Human Rights, 1953, American Convention on Human Rights, 1978 and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights.

On what international human rights lawyers do, he said their roles include pushing states to fulfill their obligations under International human rights law, hold them accountable when they don’t, work to strengthen the international human Rights system and strengthen existing standard band develop new standard.

Next Mr. Brian talked about his firm Perseus Strategies and what they do to include legal services, international human rights, government affairs, and corporate social responsibility, non- profit strategy consulting.

On International human rights he noted that their work has involved political prisoners, International torts, International parental child abduction, responsibility to protect and thematic work. The modus operandi includes documenting/ naming and shaming, legal advocacy, political advocacy, incentives and whatever works. He went on to give examples of cases the firm has handles involving International human rights violations and the method deployed for each particular cases. He ended with a background on his career path, entertained questions from participants and the webinar ended at about 7pm.