Published on 17-11-2025, Last modified on 17-11-2025
Human Rights Week 2025
From 8 to 12 December 2025, the Human Rights Research Network (HRRN) at Ghent University invites you to participate in Human Rights Week, an annual event for collective reflection on how human rights are experienced, represented, and contested across communities and disciplines. This year, we focus on how human rights take shape during moments of profound ecological, political, and cultural transformation.
Our programme emphasizes that human rights are not only protected through institutions and legal norms but also imagined, narrated, and made legible through the stories people tell. Climate change, displacement, colonial legacies, and struggles for land and dignity each generate unique vocabularies of harm and resilience. These stories appear in many forms: a documentary capturing pressures on Indigenous livelihoods; a public lecture exploring human rights in EU external action; a poetry evening giving voice to Palestinian writers; and a workshop inviting participants to experiment with visual and narrative techniques to document human rights realities.
We invite you to explore the full programme below, engage critically with its conversations, and join us in thinking about how human rights might be reimagined for the complex realities of our time.
We look forward to welcoming you to Human Rights Week 2025.
📅 Monday 8 December
📌10h00 – 11h15, Campus Ledeganck
Guest lecture within the class “Geschiedenis van het publiekrecht en de politiek” with Martien Schotsmans, Director at the Federal Human Rights Institute
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📌 19h45 – 22h00, Studio Skoop | Sint-Annaplein 63, 9000 Gent
🎬 Film Vertoning “Reel Borders: At the Edges of Europe”
Wat betekent een grens? Is het een lijn op een kaart, een versterkte muur, een digitaal paspoort, of misschien een product van onze verbeelding? De afgelopen decennia hebben grenzen zich in Europa aan ijltempo vermenigvuldigd. Door hun alomtegenwoordigheid worden ze vaak als vanzelfsprekend beschouwd. Grenzen zijn echter menselijke uitvindingen. Voordat ze worden gebouwd, moeten ze eerst worden bedacht.
Het Reel Borders-project (VUB) bestudeert de symbolische eigenschappen van grenzen door te kijken naar hoe grenzen in films worden gerepresenteerd. Dit programma met korte films passeert zes verschillende grenslijnen en dwaalt daarbij langs vragen over nationaliteit, identiteit en autonomie aan de rand van Europa. Van de gemilitariseerde hekkens van Ceuta en de wachttorens op Cyprus tot de geesten van de Ierse grens en Syrische herinneringen aan ontheemding, deze films brengen een fictieve cartografie in dialoog met de grenzen die onze wereld vormgeven.
Dit is een evenement van onze partner CESSMIR (Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees).
Meer info & tickets
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📌 19h00 – 20h30, Provinciehuis | Charles de Kerchovelaan 189, 9000 Gent
Evening Lecture “Human Rights in EU External Action” (EN)
The protection and promotion of human rights is one of the EU’s external action objectives (Art. 21 TEU). In practice, however, there is a certain tension between the EU’s normative commitments and its (geo)political and economic interests. This lecture explores the EU’s toolbox to influence third countries, and the limits of its leverage in a rapidly changing international order.
Particular attention will be given to the dilemmas arising when economic or security concerns collide with human rights principles, By unpacking these dynamics, the lecture invites reflection on whether the EU can sustain its identity as a credible promoter of human rights beyond its borders.
Registration is free via this link
📅 Tuesday 9 December
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📌 18h00 – 19h30, VIERNULVIER | Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 23, 9000 Gent
Writing Against Erasure: Literary Voices from Gaza (EN)
In the framework of Human Rights Week, this literary evening focuses on writing from Gaza and the role of literature in times of genocide: how words can resist erasure and reclaim what violence seeks to destroy. Authors Fatena Al-Ghorra and Karim Abualaroos will engage in conversation with Brigitte Herremans and discuss the meaning of writing and how writing becomes a means of expression and survival.
In partnership with VIERNULVIER
Registration is free via this link
📅 Wednesday 10 December
📌20h00 – 22:00, Sphinx Cinema | Sint-Michielshelling 3, 9000 Gent
🎬 FREE PUBLIC SCREENING AND TALK: Academia goes cinema: Indigenous storytelling about the environment and human rights (EN)
Join us for the screening of two documentaries from Nepal and Colombia that weave Indigenous visions of rivers, law, and justice beyond the human.
An interactive dialogue will follow with the Indigenous judge from Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace – protagonist of the Colombian film -, members of the Indigenous creative team from Nepal, and the project’s principal investigator moderated by filmmaker and climate activist Nic Balthazar.
The Free public screening will feature the two films:
Marsyangdi Wile Ri’iba: May You Live as Long as the River, set in rural Nepal (synopsis and teaser)
Aty Seikuinduwa: A Judge Between Worlds, (synopsis and teaser) filmed in Colombia.
Co-organised by ERC Project RIVERS, Human Rights Research Network, Human Rights Centre, Green Office, Conflict Research Group, Global Minds, and UGent Doctoral Schools
In collaboration with Hello Symbiocene!
Registration is free via this link
📅 Thursday 11 December
📌10h00 – 11h15, Campus Aula
Master class screening Twin Documentary and Q&A in the Course International Environmental Law (EN)
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📌14h30 – 17h15, Vergaderzaal 3.30 Camelot, Blandijnberg 2
College “James Baldwin en de dekolonisatie van Europa” in het kader van het vak “Literatuur en dekolonisatie” (NL)
In dit college onderzoeken prof. dr. Pieter Vermeulen en dr. Remo Verdickt (KU Leuven) hoe het werk en denken van James Baldwin kunnen bijdragen aan een kritische reflectie op de dekolonisatie van Europa. Vertrekkend van Raoul Pecks documentaire I Am Not Your Negro en de inleiding van Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s boek Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (vooraf te bekijken en te lezen), analyseren zij hoe Baldwins inzichten over racisme, geweld en historische ontkenning doorwerken in een Europese context. De sessie, ingebed in het vak “Literatuur en dekolonisatie” van de ManaMa Literatuurwetenschappen (gedoceerd door prof. dr. Stef Craps en prof. dr. Pieter Vermeulen), nodigt uit om Baldwins gedachtegoed te verbinden met actuele discussies over herinneringscultuur, identiteit en postkoloniale verantwoordelijkheid.
Registratie is gratis via deze link.
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📌14h00 – 16h30, Rm John Vincke ( 3rd floor) | Technicum 1, Campus UFO, Ghent University
🧩 ‘Making the Invisible Visible’: Co-creative cinematographic storytelling across Indigenous and legal worlds (EN)
This workshop invites PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to reflect collectively on the process of co-developing two “twin documentaries” as part of legal ethnographic research in Nepal and Colombia within the ERC project RIVERS: Human Rights Beyond the Human (2019–2026). Bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers, researchers, and artists, the session explores how co-creative visual storytelling can intersect with socio-legal inquiry to construct narratives that reflect Indigenous perspectives on nature, law, and justice.
Through transdisciplinary collaboration, the documentaries blend immersive cinematography with collective narrative-building, exposing tensions between Indigenous knowledge systems and extractivist legal orders while imagining alternative legal futures grounded in pluralism, spirituality, and resistance. The workshop invites critical discussion on the ethical, political, and methodological challenges of visual storytelling in contexts shaped by colonial legacies, environmental violence, and Indigenous struggles for rights and recognition.
Registration is free via this link
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📌19h00 – 21h00, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences | EN
Guest Lecture within the class “Studium Generale”: “Health between worlds: a conversation with Colombian Indigenous spiritual leader and healer Mamo Menjabin about planetary health”
What does it mean to heal in a world of many worlds?
In this session, Colombian Indigenous spiritual leader Mamo Menjabin opens a dialogue on planetary health, spirituality, and the interdependence of life across humans and nature.
Screenings of the twin documentaries Marsyangdi Wile Ri’iba (Nepal) and Aty Seikuinduwa (Colombia), co-created within the ERC project RIVERS, will accompany the conversation, with the presence of the Indigenous creative team from Nepal.