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The conference will be opened by Carlos Fara, President of CADAL; Maximilian Hedrich, Representative of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Brazil; and Natasha Steinberg, Director of Human Rights of the Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.
The first panel, titled “Is Anything Still Standing? The International Human Rights System in the Face of Democratic Backsliding,” will be moderated by Inés Pousadela and will feature Eduardo Ulibarri, former Ambassador of Costa Rica to the United Nations; Patricia Tappatá, former member of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela; and Andrea Oelsner, Director of the Master's Program in International Politics and Economics at Universidad de San Andrés (UDESA). The panel will address the following questions: Is the international human rights system in crisis, or was it always more fragile than we believed? What are the structural threats to the international human rights regime, and which are circumstantial? What changes with the Trump administration, and what had already been changing beforehand? Does civil society have any real capacity to influence the international human rights system? What concrete limitations does it face, particularly medium-sized and small organizations from the Global South? Are there well-founded reasons for hope, or are we facing a historic shift that requires rethinking strategies from scratch?
The second panel, titled “The Global Defence of Human Rights,” will examine the following questions: Which strategies have proven most effective in supporting democratic activism in authoritarian contexts? How can international solidarity be articulated with local agendas without reproducing dynamics of dependency or imposition? What lessons have we learned in recent years regarding the funding and sustainability of transnational activism? Speakers will include Roberto Saba, human rights lawyer; Inés Pousadela, Head of Research and Analysis at CIVICUS and Vice President of CADAL; María Teresa Blandón, activist with La Corriente Feminista de Nicaragua; and Alfredo Okenve, activist from Equatorial Guinea. This panel will be moderated by Rubén Chababo, former Director of the Museum of Memory of Rosario and academic advisor to CADAL.
The third panel will present the Tyranny Tracker, developed by the Human Rights Foundation, led by Javier El Hage, with commentary from Elisa Trotta Gamus, Jonathan Duarte and Eduardo Repilloza. This panel will argue that democracy in Latin America and around the world remains under pressure, with growing trends of democratic backsliding and highly repressive authoritarian regimes tightening their grip on power. At the same time, external pressure has put the region's most closed regimes in a difficult position, forcing them to make concessions and opening up expectations of reform or transition. In this context, the Human Rights Foundation's (HRF) Tyranny Tracker monitors the key variables needed to observe trends and the state of countries in the region, offering essential insight into electoral competition, freedom of dissent and institutional accountability, the three fundamental pillars of democratic governance. Within this framework, the panel will examine the cases of the region's three dictatorships, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, along with one of the most notorious examples of accelerated democratic backsliding, El Salvador, and will discuss the importance of tools such as the Tyranny Tracker and the outlook for each case's future potential.
The final panel will be held in English, titled “Are There Reasons for Hope in the International Defence of Human Rights?” Speakers will include Marcelo Alegre, human rights lawyer, and Dolkun Isa, President of the Uyghur Center for Democracy and Human Rights, moderated by María de los Ángeles Lasa, academic advisor to CADAL. This panel raises the question: when governments, both authoritarian and democratic, restrict rights and silence civil society, what real tools remain for resistance? What would we say to someone who feels that committing to the defence of human rights no longer makes sense?
Registration is free and allows participants to register for the entire conference or for a specific panel. Advance registration is required and can be completed here.
