Dr. John Reynolds, Associate Professor at the School of Law & Criminology, spoke recently at an international symposium hosted by UCLA School of Law’s Promise Institute for Human Rights on the theme of Borders, the Pandemic and Human Rights: ‘Borders regulate rights, resources, and responsibilities. Globally, national borders have tightened in response to COVID-19, while socially constructed “borders” – such as race and indigeneity, sexual orientation and gender identity, and disability status – have filtered the impact of the pandemic on people at home and on the move.’ The symposium considered the interplay of these different borders, the pandemic and human rights. Keynote addresses were delivered by E. Tendayi Achiume, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, and Soledad García Muñoz, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights. Dr. Reynolds spoke in the panel on race and ethnicity, which explored how various racial identity markers themselves become borders that mediate access to rights, in the context of migrations and global pandemics.
John Reynolds is Programme Director of Maynooth’s LLM programme in Global Legal Studies, and teaches a range of international law and human rights modules across LLM and LLB programmes, including a final year module on Race, Racism and Law.