The United Nations is facing a financial emergency so acute that it threatens not only the day-to-day functioning of its institutions but also the very architecture of the multilateral human rights system. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the institutional anchor of global rights protection, recently announced a shortfall of around US $60 million in its core budget, having received only US $179 million of the US $246 million allocated for 2025. Extra-budgetary funding, on which many of its programmes rely, has simultaneously been cut by another US $60 million. These are not abstract numbers: they translate into treaty bodies forced to cancel sessions for the first time in their history, special rapporteurs restricted to a single country visit each year, and commissions of inquiry struggling to secure the staff and resources needed to investigate atrocities. The crisis raises an unsettling question – are we witnessing a temporary budgetary glitch, or the beginning of a deeper unraveling, in which states no longer have the political will to sustain the human rights project they created? This column takes up that question by tracing the roots of the UN's financial shortfall, examining its immediate and long-term consequences, situating it against pre-existing weaknesses in the system, and exploring whether its timing – coinciding with an increasingly hostile global environment for human rights – is mere coincidence or symptomatic of a more profound shift. It concludes with reflections on survival: not through unbounded expansion, but through consolidation, reform, and above all, solidarity.

This column argues that it no longer makes sense to speak about the ‘moral equality of soldiers’ or a soldier's ‘licence to kill’ in wartime. International law now imposes individual criminal responsibility on those involved in the crime of aggression. International human rights law considers lives lost as a result of aggression to be arbitrary deprivations of the right to life and therefore the responsibility of the aggressor state. The individual soldiers on the aggressor side can be considered liable for contributing to acts violating the UN Charter and human rights law. This can lead to concrete legal consequences, such as becoming ineligible for asylum or liability to being individually sanctioned. Once we consider that all the lives lost as a result of aggression are human rights violations, this changes how violations of the right to life are reported and calculated. All soldiers and civilians killed as a result of a state's aggression are victims of human rights violations, and the claims of their survivors are just starting to be heard.

Despite increasing recognition of the intersections between human rights and environmental protection, relatively little attention has been paid to the use of international environmental law in the interpretation of human rights law by UN human rights bodies. This article examines how and to what extent international environmental standards may be used in the interpretation of human rights by UN bodies, utilising the legal interpretive method of systemic integration under Article 31(3)(c) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties 1969, with a particular focus the recent Torres Strait Islanders case before the Human Rights Committee. The article analyses the situations in which systemic integration may be used to integrate environmental standards in the interpretation of human rights and concludes with some evaluative reflections on the use of systemic integration in this context, the advantages, disadvantages, limitations, and implications.

The aim of this column is to illuminate a divergence which apparently exists amongst scholars in the burgeoning field of human rights education (HRE) concerning the value of law in educating about, through and for human rights. To this end, the column critically reviews a wide spectrum of views in the scholarly literature on HRE between those who are either supportive of the need to include law and legal knowledge law in HRE, agnostic about its benefits, or squarely against it on the basis of a perceived Western bias. It concludes with a call for greater cross-disciplinary engagement and deeper reflection by legal scholars in particular on the contribution that they could potentially make to the emerging debate about the value of law in the scholarly field of HRE.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of online and technology-facilitated violence, the Platform of independent expert mechanisms on discrimination and violence against women (the EDVAW Platform) plays a key role in bringing together international and regional mechanisms. Published in 2022, its first thematic report addresses the pressing need to tackle online and technology-facilitated violence, offering a comprehensive overview and proposing collective actions. This article provides the first detailed analysis of this policy document, first exploring its terminology and understanding of this new yet deeply entrenched form of abuse, rooted in the long-lasting subordination and systemic violence against women in society. It then delves into key themes identified by the EDVAW Platform, urging collaborative efforts among its members. A call to action resonates throughout, advocating the integration of this cause into broader human rights practices. Ultimately, the article underscores the importance of policies promoting intersectionality, victim-centric approaches, and proactive engagement with the private sector.

In a period of heightened societal expectations and investment in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, this article directs attention towards the risks and concerns associated with relying on AI to address climate change. These include: AI's climate consumptionism in the form of its direct and indirect environmental footprint; AI's legitimation of techno-centric thinking within climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives; AI's entanglement in repressive practices of surveillance against climate activists and migrants; and AI's influence over public discourse in ways that undermine societal responsiveness to climate change. At a time when these risks are garnering greater public attention, this article assesses the promise and perils of rights-based approaches for addressing them. To this end, the article identifies three challenges that may inhibit the value of rights-based approaches at the intersection of climate and AI governance: first, the challenge of concretisation, encompassing difficulties translating the open-textured vocabulary of rights into more concrete operational standards that are attuned to the particularities of AI technologies; second, the challenge of individualism, encompassing difficulties of relying on the predominantly individualised discourse of rights to address the collective and societal concerns to which climate applications of AI give rise; and finally, the challenge of marketised managerialism, encompassing the challenge of guarding against corporate capture given the dominance of Big Tech companies in global AI supply chains. The article concludes that harnessing rights-based approaches requires being candid about their limitations, uncertainties, and perils – acknowledging rather than smoothing over the complexities and weaknesses of rights as a vocabulary for confronting risks and concerns at the intersection of climate change and AI.

The annual SIM Peter Baehr lecture celebrates the founding of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) in 1981 and commemorates the late Peter Baehr, one of SIM's former directors and an eminent human rights scholar. The 2024 lecture was delivered by Eva Brems, Professor of Human Rights Law and head of the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University. The lecture was part of the Annual Toogdag of the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research, hosted by SIM and the Utrecht University Law School on 27 June 2024.

The financialisation of housing has been extensively critiqued by human rights proponents. One of the latest asset classes created by financialisation is student accommodation, reflecting the growing perception of students as a profitable consumer market. This article undertakes a human rights-based policy assessment of students’ enjoyment of the right to adequate housing as enshrined in Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, with a focus on the interrelated elements of availability and affordability. The article utilises the UK as its principal case study to illustrate some of the broad challenges to students’ right to housing in a high-income country, in recognition that students in other nations are likely to encounter specific issues which may concern other elements of the right. It demonstrates that threats to the availability and affordability of student accommodation in the UK are rooted in the national housing crisis, which in turn impedes the enjoyment of students’ rights to food, education, and health. The article concludes that action is required by national governments, universities, investors, landlords, and the international human rights regime to address the global student housing crisis in university locations worldwide.