Join us for a talk with Professor Laurie Nathan – Centre for Mediation in Africa, University of Pretoria – on her recent paper exploring the relationship between Westphalian sovereignty, defined as the state’s domestic autonomy in relation to external actors, and international and regional human rights conventions. It disputes the dominant position in the scholarly literature, namely that the conventions compromise and constrain sovereignty. Rather it argues that the core international conventions have no effect on the autonomy of the state parties because they exclude enforcement and binding adjudication mechanisms. These conventions are quintessentially sovereignty-respecting institutions. The paper does not imply that sovereignty is ethically superior to human rights – rather, it is a consequence of the elemental fact that human rights regimes are constructed and overseen by states, whose paramount interests lie in preserving sovereignty.