From 20 to 24 June 2022, Wouter Vandenhole, a member of the Law and Development Research Group, conducted a doctoral training seminar on future-proofing human rights at the Center for Human Rights, College of Law & Governance Studies, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. The seminar explored whether there is a need for future-proofing human rights, and how that could be done. Four challenges to and limitations of human rights law were studied: its myopic focus on the State as the sole duty-bearer; its inability to address questions of deep socio-economic inequality, its neglect of planetary boundaries and its (neo)colonial outlook.