Professor Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to deliver Ruth Adler Memorial Lecture

Edinburgh Law School will welcome Professor Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, to deliver the second Ruth Adler Memorial Lecture of 2019 on 1st October.

Professor Alston will speak on, ‘Making the Digital Welfare State work for people’ in a public event co-hosted by the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law.

The lecture will address:

‘The application of digital technologies by governments is already transforming governance, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the welfare sector.  The emergence of the digital welfare state in the UK and elsewhere should be a cause for celebration because of the immense potential that artificial intelligence, data matching, and automation have to create a better and more supportive world for those most in need in society.  But experience to date points in a very different direction.  The digital welfare state is often endlessly intrusive and demanding, it is rigid and heartless, and it is driven by notions of efficiency and cost-savings that have all too little to do with welfare.  Can it be turned around?’

Professor Alston is one of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of international human rights law. He is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, and Faculty co-Chair of the NYU Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. Prof Alston was appointed as UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights in 2014, having held a range of senior UN appointments for over two decades, including UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions from 2004 to 2010.  In April 2019, he released a report on his mission to the United Kingdom in his capacity as Special Rapporteur, which examined the consequences of austerity on the enjoyment of human rights in the UK.

Details concerning his UN mandate can be found here.

Biographical details can be found here.

‘Making the Digital Welfare State work for people’ is free to attend and open to all, but registration is essential via Eventbrite.

The Ruth Adler Memorial Lecture series was founded by the Adler family in memory of our former colleague, Ruth, and her career-long advocacy and activism in the field of human rights. The series has included high-profile lectures from Philippe Sands, Shami Chakrabarti and Professor Bryan Stevenson.