In July 2022, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right. The UNGA calls upon states, international organizations, businesses, and other stakeholders to “scale up efforts” to ensure a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment for all. It took five decades of advocacy to elevate the right to a human right of universal recognition. The distinguished panel of experts will walk us through the journey and highlight possible lessons for gaining recognition of a universal human right to claim innocence.

The concept of international human rights has greatly evolved over time and has expanded to incorporate new types of rights. Advocates, scholars, and human rights lawyers have gained invaluable experience in the course of promoting new rights and having them recognized as international human rights. In this session, two leading experts on human rights and the controversy surrounding the recognition of new rights will share their insights for the innocence community.

Please join us for a discussion of recent developments in "Innocence" work in Asia and the United States. Experts from China, Japan, Taiwan and the U.S. will discuss significant trends in exonerating the innocent with special panels focusing on the exclusion of junk science from evidence and the positive and negative roles played by prosecutors, that is, sometimes supporting exonerations and contributing to wrongful convictions.