Apr242025
The Duty to Prevent, Guarantor Institutions and State Capture: Theorizing from the Global South
Join us for an discussion of the critical link between a state’s responsibility to prevent human rights violations and the design of its constitutional institutions, drawing on experiences from the Global South, including Nepal, South Africa, and Sri Lanka.
Event Overview
This is a hybrid event. Please register here to attend virtually on Zoom. Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees.
Please join us for an engaging event that examines the critical link between a state’s responsibility to prevent human rights violations and the design of its constitutional institutions. Drawing on experiences from the Global South, including Nepal, South Africa, and Sri Lanka, this event will explore Guarantor Institutions, such as Elections Commissions and Human Rights Commissions. These institutions are designed to guarantee non-self-enforcing constitutional norms and serve as an institutional mechanism to prevent human rights violations. From a design perspective, these institutions are distinct from the traditional branches of the state and give expression to the guarantor functions of the state. Experiences in the Global South suggest that these institutions aim to tackle state capture but remain vulnerable to the same. These experiences suggest that these are a new type of constitutional institutions that have the potential to give expression to the duty of states to prevent human rights violations.
This event is sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program and the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, along with HLS Advocates for Human Rights.
Speaker:
Dinesha Samararatne is a Professor at the Department of Public & International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, Senior Fellow of the Melbourne Law School, Australia and an independent expert to the Constitutional Council of Sri Lanka. Her research interests include judicial review, constitutional resilience, women and constitutional law, guarantor institutions, academic freedom and the relevance of the global south in comparative constitutional law. She read for her LLM at Harvard Law in 2009 as a Junior Fulbright Scholar.
Moderator:
Manisha Dissanayake 25’ is a lawyer with a focus on human rights and constitutional law practicing in the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Sri Lanka. Founding Director of The Arka Initiative, an NGO working on sexual and reproductive rights issues primarily in the grassroots. LL.B. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. MA from the University of Colombo.