International Human Rights Clinic

Clinical Instructor Deborah Popowski '08 has led the effort to hold psychologists accountable for their involvement in torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Thirteen Harvard Law School students were selected as the 2016 Cravath International Fellows. The fellows traveled to 12 countries for winter term clinical placements or independent research with an international, transnational, or comparative law focus. Below, four of those students are highlighted.

Harvard Law School hosted the first-ever Legal, Cultural and Strategic Issues in Counterterror Operations Symposium bringing together military officers from the 3rd Legal Operations Detachment and academic scholars whose work focuses on areas of Islamic and human rights law as well as on cultural and international security issues.

Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic and its partners have filed a petition for writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court in the In re South African Apartheid Litigation suit, asking the Court to clarify the circumstances under which defendants may be held accountable in U.S. courts for human rights violations.

A controversial process created by one of the world’s largest gold mining companies to compensate women for rapes and gang rapes in Papua New Guinea was deeply flawed, said human rights investigators and legal experts at Columbia and Harvard Law Schools in a study released in November.

As the humanitarian crisis in Syria deepens, a panel at Harvard Law School explores the role of photography in documenting and raising international awareness about torture, mass killings, and other atrocities committed by the Assad regime.

Myanmar police officers used excessive force during a crackdown on protesters and arrested more than 100 individuals in Letpadan, Bago Region in March, according to a new report released today by Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic and Fortify Rights.

Fernando Delgado ’08 and his students in the International Human Rights Clinic put prisoners’ voices in Brazil at the heart of a human rights case.

Susan Farbstein '04 has been appointed Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she has been an assistant clinical professor at HLS since 2012.

In recent blog posts, two students from the Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic shared their experiences working on education and transport-related issues in rural South Africa.

The International Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Watch recently released 'Mind the Gap: The Lack of Accountability for Killer Robots,' a 38-page report that details significant hurdles to assigning personal accountability for the actions of fully autonomous weapons under both criminal and civil law.

For law students interested in entrepreneurism and startups—as entrepreneurs themselves, as lawyers representing startups, or both—there is a wealth of growing and intersecting opportunities at Harvard Law School and across the university.

Five Harvard Law School professors presented a sampling of their innovative ideas in late May at the 2014 Harvard Law School Thinks Big lecture, an annual event that challenges faculty to explain those big ideas in short talks.

Clinical Professor Tyler Giannini was selected to receive the prestigious Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence. He was selected by the Class of 2014 in recognition of his teaching ability and general contributions to student life at the law school.

A panel of scholars gathered at Harvard Law School March 14 to examine the legacy of Nelson Mandela with a discussion about the use of violence for political or social change.

Some recent faculty and clinical highlights—from research on anti-corruption efforts to conferences on financial regulation.

just 24 years old, Maeve O’Rourke LL.M. ’10 went to the United Nations with a bold and unprecedented case against the Irish government. Appearing in Geneva before the Committee Against Torture in 2011, O’Rourke argued that Ireland had allowed the enslavement and forced labor of thousands of women throughout most of the 20th century. What she wanted, she told the committee, was for the government to acknowledge its complicity, to apologize and to pay reparations to the victims.

Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic argues that the Alien Tort Statute applies to corporations From left: Assistant Clinical Professor Susan Farbstein ’04,…

Read more about what compelled Jonathan Nomamiukor ’13 to take a break from law school, his work with Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic on the issue of fully autonomous weapons, and the mentorship he received from Clinical Instructor Bonnie Docherty.

In a Supreme Court case, the International Human Rights Clinic argues that the Alien Tort Statute applies to corporations.

Abandoned weapons that were once part of Muammar Qaddafi’s vast arsenal threaten civilian lives in Libya, according to a report released Aug 2 by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), in partnership with CIVIC and the Center for American Progress.

Under the leadership of Harvard Law School Clinical Instructor Deborah Popowski, HLS’s International Human Rights Clinic is participating in the Protest and Assembly Rights Project, formed in January 2012. On July 25, the first report in the Protest and Assembly Rights Project series was released, calling on New York City authorities to stop the pattern of abusive policing of Occupy Wall Street protests.

There she stood, in northern Libya, a spread of explosive weapons before her: mortars and rockets and surface-to-air missiles almost 20 feet long. For all her work in post-conflict zones, senior clinical instructor Bonnie Docherty ’01 had never seen anything like it. The weapons stretched on for miles. It was March, five months after the revolution had ended, and Docherty was supervising a team from the International Human Rights Clinic on a trip to assess the humanitarian risks of abandoned weapons. As the team traveled from city to city, the scale of the problem was startling.

Last fall, the Harvard Law Documentary Studio offered Lauren Estévez ’13 and four other students the training, funding and equipment they needed to make a short documentary film. It was a challenge, fitting filmmaking into law school. But after months of research, shooting, and editing, Estévez’s 12-minute film about the lives of citrus workers in Florida screened this month at the Harvard Film Archive, part of the Studio’s first annual DOC Festival.

During the third week in March, a number of Harvard Law students traveled around the world and to remote areas in the U.S. to offer their legal services. With funding from the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs, teams of students worked with farmers in the Mississippi Delta, immigrants in Alabama and patients living with HIV/AIDS in New Orleans.

Susan Farbstein, a leading practitioner in the field of human rights, has been appointed assistant clinical professor of law and co-director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School.

In December, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of petitioners in a major Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. The brief in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. argues that corporations can be held liable for violations of the law of nations under the ATS.

In an Aug. 17 opinion piece in Australia’s National Times, Senior Clinical Instructor Bonnie Docherty '01 urged the Australian Senate to push back against proposed implementation legislation that would blunt the impact of the international ban on cluster munitions. 

The United Nation’s Committee on the Rights of the Child is currently examining Panama’s record on children’s rights with the help of a report coauthored by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.

On June 17, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a petition for certiorari in a major corporate Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co.

In 2006, a series of coordinated uprisings in 74 detention centers and attacks on police stations and public buildings left 43 state officials and hundreds of civilians dead and brought São Paulo—South America’s largest city and financial capital—to a standstill. Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the leading Brazilian human rights group Justiça Global have now released a comprehensive study of the attacks.

Last month, Joseph G. Phillips ’12 and Joanne Box LL.M. ’11, students in the HLS International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), attended a U.N. disarmament conference, where they met with diplomats to urge adoption of stronger international laws regarding the use of incendiary weapons. The students worked under the supervision of HLS Lecturer on Law and Clinical Instructor Bonnie Docherty ’01, who is one of the country’s leading legal experts on cluster munitions and has expanded her work to other disarmament issues, including incendiary weapons.

When HLS Professor Clinical Professor Jim Cavallaro decided there should be "a structured means of studying the broad jurisprudence and practice of the Inter-American system,” he and Stephanie Brewer ’07 created an on-site course in San José, Costa Rica where students can learn the law on the ground from judges, practitioners and stakeholders in the system. This January, the 20 students enrolled in “Doctrine and Practice of the Inter-American Human Rights System” came away with a deeper understanding of that system—plus an immersion in the world of human rights adjudication.

Philip Alston, Harvard Law School’s Sidley Austin Visiting Professor of Law, received an honorary doctorate from Maastricht University in the Netherlands on Jan. 20 as part of the university’s 35th anniversary celebration.

Tyler Giannini has been appointed as a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School. He was formerly a lecturer on law at HLS.

Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Second Circuit in support of a petition for rehearing en banc in a major corporate Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) case, Kiobel, et al. v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., et al.

Last year, as part of Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic, Susannah Knox ’10 and Lauren Pappone ’11, traveled to British Columbia with Lecturer on Law and Clinical Instructor Bonnie Docherty '01 to investigate how mining affects the Takla Lake First Nation people.