Over a year and a half, the global pandemic has added new and unprecedented challenges for human rights on top of existing ones. Uncovering the pervasive inequality and injustice of the neoliberal world order, the pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of social and economic rights all over the world, and the profound ways in which they bear on the right to life. 

It is in this context that the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey organises the international symposium, “Human Rights Agenda in the Post-Pandemic Era”. Some of the major questions we will be adressing are: 

  • What does the corporatization of states signify for human rights? 
  • How to defend truth in a post-truth world?
  • What do new technologies hold for the future of human rights?
  • How should the human rights movement rise up to the challenges of the post-pandemic era?
  • What to learn from ongoing struggles? And how to imagine new strategies? 

With the participation of scholars and activists from Turkey and abroad, the symposium will be held online on May 20-23, 2021. It aims to bring together activists, scholars, and the general public –particularly social groups with a potential to engage in human rights struggle– for discussing the alarming agenda of human rights and producing ideas with a view to overcoming current challenges.