About the Journal

The "MenschenRechtsMagazin" (MRM) – subtitled: "Information, Opinions, Analyses" – set itself the task when it was founded in 1996 of "contributing to informing parliamentarians, authorities, courts and lawyers as well as the interested public about possibilities and developments in international human rights protection", as its founder Eckart Klein wrote in the foreword to the first issue. Within only a few years, the MRM had established itself as a journal for international human rights protection and was able to attract an increasing number of international authors. From the outset, the journal was open to contributions from philosophy, political science and history.

The MRM is a publication of the Human Rights Centre of the University of Potsdam (MRZ), Germany’s oldest university centre with a focus on human rights, founded in 1994. In terms of content, the MRM has benefited from the membership of its legal directors, Eckart Klein and Andreas Zimmermann, in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and in its early years set its focus accordingly.

The MRM has been published since October 1996, with three issues per year from 1997 to 2007 and two issues per year since then. In the anniversary year 2019 (25 years of the Human Rights Centre), a double issue of 152 pages was published. A special issue was published to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 50th anniversary of the European Convention on Human Rights and the 25th anniversary of the International Covenants on Human Rights, respectively. By the end of 2022, a total of 65 printed issues had been published.

Since 2023, the journal has been published online as an open access publication. It accepts contributions on human rights from historical, philosophical, political and legal perspectives. Contributions may be published either in German or English.

Open access means unrestricted and free access to scientific information on the internet aiming at a fast and sustainable dissemination of research results. The MRM and the University of Potsdam refer to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities of October 2003, which was signed by the University of Potsdam in 2015.

The contributions to the journal are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. More information about this license is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. All published content of the journal will be archived by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB).