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The Irish Centre for Human Rights continues its lunchtime seminar series with a seminar on 'The Right to Protest' by Prof Illan Wall. The seminar takes place at 1pm, Wednesday, 8th March 2023, in the Seminar Room, Irish Centre for Human Rights and on Zoom. All are welcome to attend. A link to take part online can be requested from humanrights@universityofgalway.ie.

Illan Rua Wall is Professor of Law at the Warwick Law School. He is currently the Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Legal Studies, founding editor of the blog criticallegalthinking.com, and a managing director of the open access publisher Counterpress. He is author of Law and Disorder (Routledge 2021), Human Rights and Constituent Power (Routledge 2012) and editor of The Critical Legal Pocketbook (Counterpress 2021).

The slogan 'defend the right to protest' has proved powerful in recent years, connecting a wide variety of organisations, activists and writers. But if we dig a little deeper, we find a significant difference of views over the meaning of this right. On the surface, we might bemoan the lack of an enumerated 'right to protest'. But the issue here is actually much more thorny. This paper traces the way in which human rights jurisprudence tends to reduce protest to speech. In this, it tends to miss the materiality of protest. The paper proposes a turn to critical legal geography as a way of remedying the human rights analysis of protest.