Lunch Seminar: Time and Its Subjects in the Human Rights Imaginary

The project, "Time and Its Subject in the Human Rights Imaginary", explores the mobilisation of time in the monitoring processes of the United Nations core human rights treaties (currently CRC, CERD, CRPD, CEDAW) in Sweden between the 1970s and 2020s. In the reports submitted to the United Nations Treaty Bodies in the monitoring of Sweden’s compliance, one is presented with efforts of temporal mobilisation as a form of legal mobilisation. The reports display manifold temporal imaginaries present in international human rights law. Continuously, civil society organisations present alternative accounts of what human rights (may) entail – and whose past, present, and future are included in the dominating perception of human rights. When different actors put their legal imagination on display and imagine laws, times, and worlds otherwise, it is not only an issue of questioning the interpretation, shaping, and practice of law, but also the conditions under which rights-subjects exist in time and the world.