Surviving an Intemperate Climate

Global warming is the existential threat facing our planet, but an increasingly challenging constitutional climate inflames it further. Drawing on her book Human Rights: The Case for the Defence (Penguin, 2024), Shami Chakrabarti will describe the challenges to human rights posed by the climate emergency alongside the ways in which these values may help us navigate our way to just transition.

Instead of embracing scientific consensus and engaging in rational debate around addressing our current greatest challenge, national and international communities engage in a culture war which weaponises false facts, demonises protest and undermines the post World War II rules-based order. In her book Human Rights: The Case for the Defence, Chakrabarti argues that whilst hard-won fundamental rights and freedoms are caught in the cross hairs, they still provide a path through these most difficult of times. After her talk, Chakrabarti will be joined in conversation by Josephine Hoegaerts.

About the speakers

Shami Chakrabarti is a human rights lawyer and campaigner, Labour Peer and was Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales. Prior to that, she was the Director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties) and its In House Counsel; Home Office laywer; Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and the University of Essex; and Honorary Professor at the Universities of Bristol and Manchester and the London School of Economics. She has written and broadcast widely, and is the author of three books: On Liberty (2014), Of Women (2017) and Human Rights: The Case for the Defence (2024).

Josephine Hoegaerts (moderator) is professor of European Culture after 1800 at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on practices of speech and citizenship in representative democracies and the histories and legacies of empire in European political culture.