“The language of humanity is often expressed through values. Human rights give us a shared understanding of values the world has agreed to uphold — freedom, equality, dignity, and peace. Those with power have a special responsibility to use that power to turn human rights values into reality for more people in more places,” said Anna Spain Bradley, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law; Faculty Director for The UCLA Promise Institute for Human Rights and The Promise Institute Europe, during the session “The Future of Human Rights” at the 2025 Human Rights and Humanitarian Forum. “The world is at an inflection point where we need to be developing the structures to support human rights, not only for the world we have but for the world we need. The challenge for everyone is to work better collectively and for the common good.”
2025 Human Rights and Humanitarian Forum, co-hosted by The Promise Institute at UCLA Law and the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, took place on May 7, 2025, bringing together global leaders, frontline advocates, and changemakers from diverse sectors. The session on “The Future of Human Rights” focused on the resilience of human rights principles amid evolving global norms and explored how cross-level collaboration—local, national, and international—can strengthen protections.
“We’re living in a moment of the failures of capitalism. Seven of the ten most powerful companies in the world are tech companies. They are profoundly implicated in the collapse of Western liberal democracies,” Safiya Noble, Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at UCLA; Co-Director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, raised concerns about the impact of tech companies and the unchecked power they wield. “They are also implicated in reorganizing social and human, political, and economic relationships. We see industries that have an outsized influence that are actually more powerful than governments and operate like nation-states. And I think we’re going to take a very close look at the way these kinds of projects are reorganizing our society and are deeply implicated in the erosion of human and civil rights.”
“I think there is a dissolution in many parts of the world with human rights. And we need to…work towards restoring and going back to the basic texts of human rights,” Unni Karunakara, Senior Fellow, Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale Law School; Former International President of MSF, emphasized that humanitarian efforts often arise from political failure. “There’s a lot of talk about humanitarians and human rights workers finding solutions for problems, but you know, humanitarians are in places because politics has failed. Governments have to be responsive to the needs of people. And we need to have at the highest level a capacity to broker peace between nations. Right now, we are [dysfunctional] at all levels.”
John Prendergast, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member and The Sentry Co-Founder, highlighted the importance of both legal and financial accountability for delivering justice: “The wheels of international justice, we all know, grind very slowly. So, some years ago we created The Sentry, which attempts to pursue accountability for those profiting from war crimes, from dictatorship,’’ Prendergast continued, “Sanctions can be a very effective tool for accountability when they are applied against entire networks. In other words, the government official at the center, most responsible for human rights abuses, but their cutouts, their businesses, their corporate footprint base, their facilitators and their enablers in the international financial system, all sanctioned at once.”
In closing, moderator Mary Milliken, Los Angeles Bureau Chief of Reuters, reflected on the panel’s insights: “As we’ve heard from our panelists, the future of human rights will be shaped not only by institutions and legal frameworks, but by how boldly we reimagine our shared responsibilities—across borders, disciplines, and generations.” She concluded by thanking the panelists for offering not just perspective, but “some doses of optimism.”