The UN CESCR's General Comment 25 on the Right to Enjoy the Benefits of Scientific Progress

One of the remarkable aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been how brilliantly science has responded: in tracing the genome of the virus, in understanding how it spreads and in developing vaccines and medical treatments for COVID-19. Yet these scientific gains have not been available to all. Article 15(1)(b) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights guarantees that: “everyone has the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress.” And, of course, this right extends to all scientific discoveries.

The way forward for carbon pricing

This online event features as one of several this term which focusses on 'Political economy of European climate action', and is hosted by the European Political Economy Project (EUPEP) at the European Studies Centre.

Speakers: Ian Parry (IMF), Michael Mehling (University of Strathclyde; Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Chair: Daniel Hardy (St Antony’s College, Oxford)
Discussant: Franziska Funke (Oxford Martin School)

For further information please visit: https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/events/way-forward-carbon-pricing

Warm Bonds or Functional Transactions? Being Neighbours During Ethnic Pogroms in India

Stories of courage abound during mass violence. Of people saving their neighbours and giving them refuge at a cost to their own lives. However, perpetrators of mass violence are often neighbours, e.g. anti-Jewish pogroms, genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, and anti-minority violence in South Asia. Neighbour-on-neighbour violence effaces the norms and values that underpin neighbourliness as a social practice given that, during community emergencies, prior hostility does not preclude cooperation between neighbours.

From a rebel to consumer and now a digital user: the changing role of students in British university governance

In this talk, we will focus on the changing role of students in British higher education governance. We will review three societal periods: the welfare state, the market society and the digital economy. Within the past three decades, the student has shifted from a partner with significant involvement in governing universities, to a consumer whose influence reflects in self-interest enacted via choice and consumer rights.

The China question: Managing risks and maximising benefits from partnership in higher education and research

How best to engage China is the first major foreign policy challenge for a post-Brexit UK and a critical question for the future of Britain’s global and open knowledge economy.

China is set to overtake the US to become both the world’s biggest spender on R&D and the UK’s most significant research partner, raising pressing questions for policymakers at a time of rising geopolitical tensions.

What is Social Science Innovation?

Innovation is often understood in terms of inventions and technology, and so primarily an activity that takes place within STEM. But innovation is broader than that and something that Social Scientists are doing across the University. This can come in the form of innovation in public policymaking, organisational and institutional innovation, and social entrepreneurship; it goes beyond the context of income generation arising from new inventions and technologies.

Treaty-Making in Business & Human Rights: Models for a Binding Instrument

In 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Council created an open-ended intergovernmental working group (IGWG) with a mandate ‘to elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises’. This movement reignited debates not only on whether a binding instrument was desirable or not, but also on what shape should a ‘BHR Treaty’ take.

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