The Centre for Policy Research, in association with the Delhi Public Law Forum, invites you to a talk on:
Social Rights from Below: Participatory Procedures and Substantive Rights
Speaker:
Dr Rishika Sahgal, Assistant Professor, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham
Discussant:
Arkaja Singh, Legal and Policy Expert & Former Fellow, CPR
Thursday, 11th December 2025, 3:30 PM IST onwards.
This event will be held in a hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room and online via Zoom. Please register to attend.
Register to attend via Zoom
Register to attend in person
About the Talk:
The talk will tackle a part of a bigger question – are justiciable social rights valuable for impoverished, racialised, gendered and otherwise intersectionally oppressed people in their fight for social justice? Under what conditions? It will focus on participatory procedures as one element of social rights. It explores whether entitlements to be heard, consulted, meaningfully engaged, in other words, to participate in decision-making around social rights, form a meaningful pathway to social justice. The talk will propose that participatory procedures enable the meaning-making of social rights from below, so these rights are relevant for the everyday realities of oppressed people. It will draw from landmark cases from Olga Tellis to recent decisions of the Delhi and Bombay High Courts to propose these arguments.
This talk seeks to contribute to debates around the adjudication of economic and social rights. Concerns have long been raised about the democratic legitimacy and institutional competence of courts in interpreting these rights. The talk will propose a solution to those concerns by requiring courts to create space for rightsholders to engage with the state and non-state actors in finding contextually relevant ways to define and vindicate their rights. Through that process, rightsholders interpret their abstract economic and social rights in a way that makes sense to their own lives. While other institutions of the state, including courts, remain relevant, the talk will emphasise the central role of rightsholders in the interpretation of their own rights. Moreover, in this role, courts serve as a means to secure decision-making power for the intersectionally impoverished, and in that way, ensure rather than impede social justice.
About the Speaker:
Dr Rishika Sahgal joined Birmingham Law School as an assistant professor in law in August 2023. Prior to that, she was the university teacher in international human rights law at the University of Sheffield. She completed the DPhil (PhD) in Law at the University of Oxford in August 2022.
Dr Rishika Sahgal’s current research explores displacement and resistance in the Global South. More expansively, it explores the role of rights holders in defining the content of their own rights, thereby playing a protagonist role in rights interpretation. It does so in the context of the right to housing and the eviction of informal settlements in India and South Africa. This research contributes to long-standing debates in the fields of public law and human rights, including the interconnectedness of civil and political and social and economic rights; the relationship between procedural and substantive rights; and the role of courts, other institutions, and rights holders themselves in defining rights.
While at Oxford, Dr Sahgal taught comparative and international human rights law at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, was Chairperson of Oxford Pro Bono Publico, Convenor of the South Asian Law Discussion Group, and Editor at the Oxford Human Rights Hub. As part of the Hub, she co-authored submissions before the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights, and the Women and Equalities Committee.
Prior to Oxford, Dr Sahgal served as law clerk to the Chief Justice of India at the Supreme Court of India. She completed her undergraduate studies in law at National Law University, Delhi, where she was senior researcher on the Death Penalty Research Project. Their research was cited by the Law Commission of India in its report recommending the abolition of the penalty, and by Dr Shashi Tharoor, member of the Indian Parliament, while introducing a private member’s bill to abolish the death penalty in India.
About the Delhi Public Law Forum:
The forum brings together public law faculty in the National Capital Region working at the intersection of public law and related disciplines such as history, politics, and sociology. As an interdisciplinary group, the forum aims to facilitate and develop all manner of discussions on Indian public law and practice.
The group is convened by faculty from participating institutions, including the Centre for Policy Research, the School of Law at BML Munjal University, the Jindal Global Law School at Jindal Global University, the School of Law at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, and the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
