Thank you for inviting me to give this year’s lecture.2 I am honoured to follow in the
footsteps of some very distinguished predecessors, to many of whom I owe an
intellectual debt. In looking at the list of previous speakers I noticed that some of
them were not lawyers. I think this would have appealed to both John Foster and
Miriam Rothschild, who would have appreciated that the subject of human rights is
far too important to be left only to lawyers.