INTRODUCTION

 

The Conference has been organised by the CIRDUIS (Siena) and the Catholic University of Milan. The CIRDUIS (founded by the Universities of Siena, Naples “Federico II”, Naples II, Naples “L’Orientale”, Foggia and Luiss Guido Carli-Rome) provides a forum to reflect on the issues of human rights, migration and aliens’ law from the main perspective of public and private international law, European Union law, constitutional and criminal law. It seeks to further cooperation among academics, experts and practitioners, with the goal of promoting research and drawing conceptual and policy lessons from the problems the above-mentioned issues pose for the development of international law and the international community. It seeks also to give legal counselling and assistance to immigrants and victims of human rights’ violations. In the last few years the CIRDUIS, with the cooperation of other institutions, has organized conferences and published three collective books.

The conference on “Global Justice, Human Rights and the Modernization of International Law” seeks to gather some Italian and foreign international academic lawyers, who have the capacity to deal with conceptual and general issues, asking them to explore (not only with an empirical method but also resting on systematic conceptions of the international legal order) on the possibilities and prospects of a process of structural modernization of international law. In our view, this process invests a widening of the concept of international community (first session of the conference); an increasing diversity and flexibility of the sources of international law (second session); and the capabilities of this law to face and resolve some of the goals for humanity, connected with human rights, that are posed by the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development. Among these goals, we have selected those concerning equality among and within States, promotion of pacific and inclusive societies and environmental protection (third session). These possible aspects of modernization of contemporary international law should be explored from the perspective and the guiding principle of developing human rights and a global justice.