The Jurisprudence of Human Rights (20th to 21st Centuries)
Felicitas is leading the research on the fifth body of jurisprudence. This body's primary research focus is on 20th century German doctrine and scholarship on personality rights. At the same time, this work package also has the important function of merging the threads and ensuring continuity between the research undertaken under each body of jurisprudence by placing a secondary focus on comparative developments in the UK as well as the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
01
The Right to Freedom of Thought
One of the core rights of our project is the right to freedom of thought. We are particularly interested in what the increased interest in this right in recent years reveals about the evolution and nature of the idea of the inner self in the social-technological background.
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Felicitas has written an 8,000-word chapter on the right to freedom of thought in the ECHR, which will feature in The Cambridge Handbook of the Right to Freedom of Thought. This book has been co-edited by Patrick and Bethany Shiner (associate scholar in our project) and will be published in early 2025. We will provide a link to this paper here once it has been published.
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Patrick has collaborated with researchers across several disciplines to evaluate and critique the UN Special Rapporteur's seminal report on the right to freedom of thought. The paper was published in the International Journal of Human Rights in 2024 and is open access here.
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Felicitas has also published a blog post on the Eastern European perspective on the right to freedom of thought in Art. 9(1) ECHR. A follow-up post, elaborating further on among other things the relation between Arts. 9(1) and 3 (prohibition of torture) ECHR will be published in the coming months.
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02
Protecting the Inner Self though Human Rights
Another focus of Felicitas’ research concerns the rights to privacy, including mental integrity and other rights developed by ECtHR jurisprudence under Article 8 ECHR, and the relationship between ECHR rights that may be interpreted as personality rights. Felicitas has recently completed a full-length paper on the protection of the inner self through human rights in the digital era. While this paper thematically stretches across bodies of jurisprudence five and six given its engagement with neuro and cyber rights, it constitutes a major contribution to the fifth body of jurisprudence due to its detailed elaboration and examination of the concept of inner self in human rights law theory and practice. 
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Felicitas presented an earlier version of this paper at the Bridging the Gap Between Neurorights and Cyberights Conference, Sant’ Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, 22nd March 2024.
We will provide a link to this paper once it is published.
03
Neurotechnology and Human Rights
Synthesizing our work on the fifth and sixth bodies of jurisprudence, in March and April 2024, Patrick, Felicitas and Talya participated in consultations with the Rapporteur of the Drafting Group on Neurotechnology and Human Rights for the Advisory Committee to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Patrick was invited to co-author a formal submission to the Advisory Committee on the potential role of the right to freedom of thought in the context of neurotechnology. This report has been published on the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
04
Human Rights for the Mind
All three team members have been invited to contribute chapters on the theme of human rights and the inner self to the forthcoming The Cambridge Handbook of Human Rights for the Mind (edited by Dore-Horgan et al). Felicitas is completing a paper on how human rights law views the inner self. Patrick's paper focuses on the role of Article 8 ECHR in safeguarding the forum internum while Talya's paper adopts a private law perspective in reflecting on the intersection between human rights and the inner self
