On 8-11, February 2019, Professor Mo Jihong, Director of CASS Institute of International Law, attended the First LAWASIA Human Rights Conference as the representative of China Law Society. The conference, held in New Delhi, India, was attended by over 250 lawyers, judges, prosecutors, and legal professors and researchers from 17 countries and regions.

 

The conference took “state power, business and human rights: contemporary challenges” as its theme and was divided into eight units in which the participants gave keynote speeches and carried out discussions around the following topics: gender, sex and human rights; new technologies, privacy and mass monitoring; human rights lawyers; aggressive policing and human rights; the freedom of speech in the digital era; conflict and cross-border movement; business and human rights; climate change, conflicts over water resource and human rights.

Professor Mo Jihong gave a keynote speech entitled “from environmental right to ecological right: returning to the essence of human rights” at the seventh session of the conference. In the speech, he gave a detailed introduction to the historical evolution of the concepts and connotations of the environmental right and the ecological right that have been confirmed by international and domestic law, analyzed from the perspective of the philosophy of rights the different natures of ecological rights and environmental rights, pointed out the logical defects in the classification of the forms of human rights by the theory of “three generation of human rights” and the need to reconstruct the logical structure of fundamental rights with “ecological right” as the fourth generation of rights, suggested that the international community, especially the LAWASIA Human Rights Committee, should make positive efforts in promoting the universal acceptance of the value of ecological right, adopt a new declaration of human rights with the safeguarding of ecological right as the main connotation of right, so as to provide new theoretical and institutional basis for the safeguarding of human rights in the future society.

The attendance by Professor Mo Jihong of the First LAWASIA Human Rights Conference fully reflected the important academic influence of Chinese scholars in this organization, further strengthened the liaison and cooperation between the Chinese law circle and LAWASIA, was conductive to the external publicity of the socialist theory of the rule of law and human rights protection with Chinese characteristics, and strengthened the Chinese people’s confidence in the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics.