Health, Identity and Justice: Genetics and Human Rights in Comparative Perspective.
Health, Identity and Justice: Genetics and Human Rights in Comparative Perspective.
Monday, 7 July 2025: 09:00-10:45
Location: FSE039 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
TG03 Human Rights and Global Justice (host committee) Language: English and Spanish
The advances in genetics and human rights have heralded shifts at both the level of transnational governance and individual identities, including, but not limited to, emergent global public health monitoring and genetic database initiatives, genetic engineering to treat disease, new forms of diagnosis, commercialized identity analyses, accountability for human rights violations, renegotiation of ideas of family and kinship, and global human rights monitoring. Although a robust scholarship has documented these shifts in genetics and human rights individually, the relationship between fields remains underexamined. This session, with its potential to inspire and motivate, analyses the socio-historical relationships between genetics and human rights in contemporary societies, focusing on international experiences from the 1980s to the present in these areas:
- Health: social and bioethical approaches that address the ethical, legal, policy and societal dilemmas at the intersection of human rights, genetics, and health.
- Identity: development of forensic genetics for identifying human remains from forced disappearances, migration and displacement, natural disasters and the restitution of identity for children kidnapped under military dictatorships or internal armed conflicts.
- Criminal Justice Systems: DNA identifiers in criminalistics and the penal justice system, exploring the social, ethical and legal implications.
- State Policies on Genetic Data Storage and Preservation: protection, storage, and preservation of genetic data and examines fundamental rights related to genetic information.
- Migration: governance of humanitarian spaces as genetics has become a potent tool in global migration from mitigation and border enforcement to tracking, family reunification and individual identification.
Session Organizers:
Discussant:
Oral Presentations