Good afternoon everybody.

Thank you very much for coming along to today's SEL's lunchtime seminar.

It's our great pleasure to welcome Marco Durante, who is currently a visiting fellow at the Lauterpac Center.

Marco is a lecturer in modern European and international history and with a particular interest

in the history of international law.

His book that was published by OUP earlier this year has the title the Conservative Human Rights

Revolution, European Identity, Transnational Politics and the Origins of the European Convention

and that's what you're going to speak about today so thank you very much for coming along to talk to us.

Thanks.

Great. Well, thank you so much for having me here in this forum.

Someone who is not trained in international law, but has had the opportunity this term in the last couple years

to increasingly be involved in that world. It's been very exciting to think about the present-day

implications of my own historical research on the origins of the European human rights system.

So what I'm going to do today is spend a good chunk of the time talking about the thesis

I presented my book, years ago, the book slide, the conservative human rights revolution,

in which I argue that the European Convention on Human Rights

was not only decisively shaped by a number of conservatives,

but also that its contents reflected both conservative values

and conservative interests, particularly as as thought about in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

So I want to talk a bit about that, but what I want to do is frame it, frame my talk in terms of

kind of what is the conventional wisdom about the origins of the European Convention, the original intent behind the European

Convention, and try to tackle some of these foundation myths.

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