Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. For a six year period beginning in 2008, he served as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.
Falk recently joined us in Lund to launch his latest book. We took the opportunity to interview him for our podcast, “On Human Rights,” on a wide range of issues, from his thoughts on the state of world affairs today to his controversial UN report on Israel and his recent book, “Revisiting the Vietnam War and International Law: Views and Interpretations of Richard Falk.”
“Law is neutral in its normative foundations,” he says, “and it depends who controls the formation and interpretation to understand if it works for private interests, national interests or human interests. My effort has been to try to align international law to a greater extent with human interest and to reinterpret national interests so they wouldn’t collide with the human interests.”