[This event is organised by MEI’s Transsystemic Law Cluster, as part of its monthly seminar series.]
Attendance is open to the NUS community only – Interested participants who are not from NUS may email meievent@nus.edu.sg.
Abstract
In the face of increasing state repression in the name of countering terrorism, human rights advocates have focused on articulating a model of counterterrorism that is compatible with a respect for human rights. This move accommodates the problematic discourse of terrorism which often forms part of the very conditions that breed human rights violations in the first place. In this talk, I consider the idea of disentangling human rights advocacy from counterterrorism. A disentangled advocacy would reaffirm and advance the critique of the discourse of terrorism for our time. Going beyond human rights-compliant counterterrorism also involves recovering the discourse and practice of human rights from minimalism or the tendency to think small and the aversion to politics.
About the Speaker(s)
Jayson Lamchek is a critical scholar with broad interests in the interdisciplinary studies of human rights. At the Australian National University, he conducted Ph.D. research on the persistence of serious human rights abuses in the context of counterterrorism in the Philippines and Indonesia. Jayson obtained his M.A. in Human Rights Practice at the Universities of Roehampton (UK), Gothenburg (Sweden) and Tromso (Norway), where he wrote a thesis on undocumented migrant domestic workers campaigning for rights in the Netherlands. He obtained his M.A. in Public Administration from the International Christian University, Tokyo, and his LL.B. and B.A. in Philosophy from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He was a recipient of the Endeavour Awards (Australia), Erasmus Mundus (European Commission) and Monbusho (Japan) scholarships.
Jayson had been a public interest lawyer in the Philippines for more than six years as well as a researcher for an environmental and indigenous rights NGO. He also taught at the University of the Philippines, Manila and Diliman.
