Framing multicultural issues in terms of human rights: solution or problem?

http://ec.europa.eu/ewsi/en/events/details.cfm?ID_ITEMS=23545

Venue: Achter Sint Pieter 200, Utrecht
Organiser: Rechtstheorie
Website: http://rechtstheorieuu.blogspot.com/

Building further on our special issue of the Utrecht Law Review of June 2010 called ‘Human rights law as a site of struggle over multicultural conflicts; Comparative and multidisciplinary perspectives’, we at Legal Theory in Utrecht felt the need to address the question: Which role human rights play in framing specific multicultural issues? Take for example the refusal to shake hands with the other sex. This ‘problem’ can easily be resolved, as often happens, in an informal and pragmatic manner. It can however also be framed in terms of ‘reasonable behaviour of an employee’, but just as well, it seems, in terms of a ‘horizontal working of human rights’: ‘freedom of speech/expression’ or ‘freedom of religion’ vs ‘non discrimination’ and ‘gender equality’. We want to investigate whether it makes a difference (for whom, in what sense?) to frame an issue one way or the other, and what the role is that the (human rights) law itself plays.