Human Rights leadership: Local, national and international Professor Alan Miller, Independent Co-Chair, Scotland’s National Taskforce for Human Rights Leadership
Event details
York Human Rights City Network: Annual Public Lecture
Background: On 24 April 2017 the Lord Mayor of York signed a declaration to mark York becoming the first UK Human Rights City. Each year at this time the York Human Rights City Network organises a public lecture to remind us of the vision of York as a vibrant, diverse, fair and safe community built on the foundation of universal human rights; and to encourage us on the journey to getting there.
This lecture offers living examples from Scotland of combining human rights leadership at local, national and international levels. At a local level it offers an insight into how tenants in Leith, Edinburgh successfully put human rights into practice to improve their housing conditions. At a national level it demonstrates why and how Scotland is introducing a new human rights framework to improve people’s lives. At an international level it places Scotland’s initiative in the post-Covid context of the UN call for all countries to “build back better” from the pandemic.
Professor Alan Miller
Alan is the Independent Co-Chair of the Scottish Government’s National Taskforce for Human Rights Leadership, is a Professor of Practice in Human Rights at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and an Independent Expert with the UNDP Crisis Response Bureau. He was unanimously elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2013 by the Scottish Parliament as the first Chair of the Scottish Human Rights Commission, elected in 2013 as the first Chair of the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions and served between 2016-2019 as Special Envoy of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions. He previously ran a legal aid practice for many years in a Glasgow housing estate.