April 23, 2015 - Prof. Hanne Petersen, University of Copenhagen, visited the Institute for Human Rights of CUPL and delivered an excellent speech to the first-year master's students. Several Ph.D students also attended the lecture.

The lecture was focused on the subject of legal culture. To start with, Prof. Petersen introduced two definitions - "internal legal culture" and "external legal culture", and made a brief comparison of the two definitions. Students demonstarted a lot of interest in discussing the significant changes that have been taking place in the Chinese legal culture. After that, Mrs. Petersen gave an exhaustive comparison between the Western legal image and the Chinese legal image, using the Confucian value hierarchy and the hierarchy of the Western legal culture as an illustration. During the comparison, the pictures of XieZhi and Justitia were presented. They symbolize justice in China and Europe respectively. In the end, Mrs. Petersen talked about globalization and the legal culture of human rights. The world has been shaped or changed by several global forces, such as technology, climate change and so on. The legal culture of human rights has also been changed under this impact. 

From the beginning to the end, students showed a great interest in the lecture and had a nice interaction with Mrs. Petersen.

As Prof. Petersen quoted in her PowerPoint presentation, “If we own it that legal thought is constructive of social realties rather than merely reflective of them, the construction of the international community in terms of human rights must be seriously studied for the reductions or distortions of reality inherent in the language.” The research of human rights at the international level still has a long way to go.

Written by He Fei