A University of Windsor criminology professor will be giving a keynote address in Ireland later this month on the seminal Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The conference, hosted by Ireland’s Maynooth University Department of Law, will bring together academics from around the world to celebrate and commiserate the 70-year-old landmark document of human rights.

“The Universal Declaration was really the first major widely accepted statement for human rights in the world,” said Randy Lippert.

“I’ll be talking about privacy as a human right, which is increasingly becoming more important.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 and was the first step in creating the International Bill of Human Rights.

Dr. Lippert said when the declaration was first drafted, a lot of thought wasn’t given to privacy rights but with the explosion of social media, it’s more important than ever.

His talk will also examine how privacy rights are sometimes “used a way of doing things besides ensuring that people have privacy.”

“If the government doesn’t want to release information to the public they will sometimes cite privacy concerns to keep things under wraps,” Lippert said, adding that privacy regulation is often very weak.

While the Declaration has been celebrated for doing great things around the world and preventing tragedies like genocide, Lippert said there are challenges with enforcement.

Lippert has two relevant books, both supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grants, that will be released in 2019.

The first is Condo Conquest: Urban Governance, Condoization, and Law in New York City and Toronto and the second, with Kevin Walby, is A Criminology of Policing and Security Frontiers.

The conference, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at Seventy; A Review of Successes and Challenges, runs from June 20 to the 21^st.

By Dylan Kristy