The St. Francis College Honors Program, in collaboration with SFC International and the Human Rights Lecture Series, is honored to present the Dr. Frank Greene Honors Lecture on "The Criminalization of Human Rights," to be delivered by Philip Alston, JSD, John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law.

Human rights institutions are increasingly preoccupied with reacting to atrocities. This tends to put a premium on prosecutions and sanctions. While these developments are important in their own right, an excessive focus on criminalization can have a distorting effect on the shape of the system as a whole, on our understanding of what human rights are all about and on the way in which resources and energies are invested by those working in the field. The challenge is how to restore a better equilibrium. In this talk, Dr. Alston will discuss this challenge and will offer his solution.

Dr. Philip Alston is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. As both a scholar and practitioner, his current work focuses on the human rights dimensions of issues such as neoliberal economic policies, climate change, artificial intelligence and poverty elimination. Among many UN roles over the past decades, he was the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Special Adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Millennium Development Goals and Chairperson and Rapporteur of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

He has previously taught at many institutions, including Harvard Law School, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Australian National University and European University Institute. He has published widely, including International Human Rights and The United Nations and Human Rights: A Critical Appraisal. His “Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights on his mission to the United States of America,” was published by the UN in 2018. He holds a Doctor of Science of Law (JSD) degree from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.

About the Dr. Frank Greene Lecture Series
Each year, the Honors Program hosts a lecture in honor of Dr. Frank Greene, an art historian and SFC Professor Emeritus who led the Honors Program for many years. These lectures follow the theme of the Honors Program's freshman honors seminar and feature a distinguished speaker on that topic. This year's theme is Human Rights.