Ekaterina Yahyaoui (Gerda Henkel Fellow, Mar – Jul ‘25) will be giving a talk on her research:

Equality and Human Rights: Between Identity and Difference

on 24 April 2025 (Thursday), at 16:30.

Moderated by Yuliya Krylova-Grek.

Abstract: The principle of equality is a founding principle of the organization of the United Nations and a core principle of its human rights machinery. Despite almost 80 years of embodiment and implementation as a legal principle, challenges to equality remain constant. Gender-based discrimination, racial discrimination or exclusions based on migrant status are telling contemporary examples. The book project tackles this conundrum of equality by arguing that the challenges to equality are not a simple accident along the road due to unwillingness or inability of governments to ensure equality but are also caused by inherent structural problems with the articulation of equality in international human rights law. The two major structural issues leading to constant re-emergence of challenges to equality are the group-based and comparative approaches embedded in the international human rights law’s principle of equality.

The book first demonstrates the structural nature of human rights’ equality principle’s focus on groups and comparisons by analyzing emergence of equality from a historical perspective. For this purpose, the ancient Greek concept of isonomia and the formulation of equality guarantee in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are put into the spotlight. If the former demonstrates a possibility of alternative visions of equality beyond groups and comparisons, the latter highlights conscious rejection of alternatives and marks inscription of biases into the human rights law.

After discussing the existing human rights law’s definition of equality through non-discrimination, the book then moves to imagining alternatives. These alternatives are proposed based on philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze and Nishida Kitaro. The former articulates an alternative vision of difference which serves as a basis for discussing equality beyond comparisons. The latter offers a refreshingly complex reflection on interdependency between individual and collective dimension of humans’ existence enabling overcoming of the group-based thinking.