This is a hybrid event. For attendance via Zoom, please register online.
Join us for an engaging event that examines the critical link between a state’s responsibility to prevent human rights violations and the design of its constitutional institutions. Drawing on experiences from the Global South, including Nepal, South Africa, and Sri Lanka, this event will explore Guarantor Institutions, such as Elections Commissions and Human Rights Commissions. These institutions are designed to guarantee non-self-enforcing constitutional norms and serve as an institutional mechanism to prevent human rights violations. From a design perspective, these institutions are distinct from the traditional branches of the state and give expression to the guarantor functions of the state. Experiences in the Global South suggest that these institutions aim to tackle state capture but remain vulnerable to the same. These experiences suggest that these are a new type of constitutional institutions that have the potential to give expression to the duty of states to prevent human rights violations.
Lunch will be provided.
Speaker
Dinesha Samararatne is a Professor at the Department of Public & International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, Senior Fellow of the Melbourne Law School, Australia and an independent expert to the Constitutional Council of Sri Lanka. Her research interests include judicial review, constitutional resilience, women and constitutional law, guarantor institutions, academic freedom and the relevance of the global south in comparative constitutional law. She read for her LLM at Harvard Law in 2009 as a Junior Fulbright Scholar.
Moderator
Manisha Dissanayake (LL.M. 25’) is an Attorney-at-Law practicing in the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, with a focus on human rights and constitutional law. She is the Founding Director of The Arka Initiative, an NGO advancing sexual and reproductive health in the grassroots of Sri Lanka. She holds an LL.B. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as an M.A. from the University of Colombo.
This event is co-sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program and the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, along with the Harvard Human Rights Journal and HLS Advocates for Human Rights.