By Michel Rouleau-Dick and Isabell Junkkari, Co-Editors-in-Chief
There’s often an interesting disconnect between the formal façade of international institutions and the reality of the persons that actually ensure their functioning. While some international tribunals and organisations must be great workplaces, we would venture that most operate on ambition, competition, and a shared determination to try to increase one’s share of the unfortunately diminishing pie of resources. Too often, this is also the climate that prevails in the higher education institutions that train and channel young minds towards these international institutions.
While there are many reasons to be a pessimist these days, apathy can never be the answer and we thus need more than ever the positivity that some people bring. In fact, the antidote to much of what is going wrong in the world these days should include two key ingredients: competent, confident expertise, and genuine care and empathy.
This August, we, the team at the Talking Rights Blog, want to highlight and celebrate the lifelong work of our “godmother”, Professor Elina Pirjatanniemi, for the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, by opening a series of blogs and symposium on this platform, along with various other celebrations. Instead of the usual “festschrift” format, we hope to honour an innovative and free-thinking scholar through an equally innovative and free-thinking format.
Fortunately or unfortunately for us, Elina’s work makes this quite a challenge since it spans so many different themes and areas of law. From constitutional law and the rule of law to migration law, including human rights and international law more broadly, we assembled a stellar roster of Elina’s friends and collaborators jointly with Elina’s colleagues at the Institute for Human Rights and Åbo Akademi University to write on issues that have shaped Elina’s work. Even if we certainly hope that you enjoy the pieces we will publish, this introduction is also an excellent opportunity to highlight a side of Elina that would otherwise only imperfectly emerge in more formal writing.
It is a sad reality of academia that there is no “How fun of a person are you?” section in grant applications, or that the amount of time saved in overheads by avoiding unnecessarily long meetings is not at least partially credited. Elina’s qualities as a colleague (and boss) are unlikely to make it to official documents and academic merits but this is a great opportunity to at least partially put this on the record.
As the head of the Institute for Human Rights, Elina has managed to build a wonderfully warm and supportive environment, one that we were lucky enough to join as “baby PhDs”. Elina would undoubtedly emphasise that this is the result of constant, collective work by all involved, but we have encountered enough toxic environments to know that it all starts and ends at the top. Elina’s decisiveness, solid common sense, accessibility, empathy and willingness to put her trust in her colleagues have been a breath of fresh air and key assets to building the Institute, but also qualities that are apparent in much of what Elina has been involved in.
This blog highlights perfectly Elina’s sometimes less obvious impacts around her. Born out of the conversation between two PhD candidates, it would have been easy to dismiss such an initiative as dead in the water or unworthy of proper support. Even if given the green light, it would have also been easy to mitigate its ambition and remain more self-contained as an “in-house” blog. Three years on and we are proud to call the Talking Rights Blog a success, with over forty individual blogs published, thousands of individual visitors and one of the best substantive review processes out there, thanks to our excellent reviewers (many of which are current or former master’s students). All this in great part thanks to Elina’s trust and support.
We trust you will enjoy the upcoming pieces and everything we have in store as part of Elina’s sixtieth birthday celebration. Much of this has been planned as a surprise to both Elina and you, the reader, and so we don’t want to reveal everything yet. But we can assure you it will be worth keeping an eye on this platform in the next few months.
Happy birthday Elina, on behalf of the blog’s team!
Michel and Isabell
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash