Susan Farbstein

...Now, a cache of 55,000 photos smuggled out of Syria last year provides a glimpse into the apparent systematic torture and death of 11,000 civilians between 2011 and 2013 inside two military police facilities in Damascus, one of which is less than a mile from the presidential palace. It’s estimated that 300,000 other prisoners remain in Assad-controlled jails. Thirty of the images are on exhibit in Lewis 202 at Harvard Law School (HLS) through Nov. 4. It’s only the third time the photos have been displayed in the United States, following showings at the United Nations headquarters and in Congress. ...The panel was moderated by Professor Susan Farbstein, co-director of the International Human Rights Clinic at HLS, and sponsored by the Human Rights Program, the Office of Public Interest Advising, and HLS Advocates for Human Rights.

Over the past decade, companies doing business in Colombia, like Chiquita Brands and Dole Food, have incurred the wrath of Terrence Collingsworth, a lawyer who has accused them of mistreating workers or conspiring to kill labor activists. But these days, Mr. Collingsworth is on the defensive...The problems engulfing Mr. Collingsworth underscore the mounting difficulties facing a small group of plaintiffs’ lawyers who have carved out a niche suing multinational corporations on charges that they violated human rights overseas...“The bar has been set higher,” for human rights litigation, said Susan H. Farbstein, a law professor at Harvard.

For more than 14 years a group of South African nationals have been fighting it out in court with the US-based corporations IBM and Ford, using a once-obscure American law from the 18th century to file a lawsuit claiming the companies aided and abetted human rights abuses carried out by the government of South Africa during apartheid rule. In a class action filing known as In re South African Apartheid, dozens of plaintiffs accuse IBM of knowingly creating a plan for, and providing technology to, the South African government — as early as the 1950s — that was used in the apartheid regime's campaign to denationalize black citizens. ..."IBM in the US basically formed and executed a plan for the South African government to denationalize black south Africans," Susan Farbstein, at Harvard Law School's Human Rights Clinic, which is currently a co-counsel on the case, told VICE News. Farbstein added that "Ford [in the US] was making key decisions" about operations in the country, which maintained apartheid from 1948 to 1994 and was placed under international sanctions in 1986.

On Nov. 7, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School released a legal memorandum, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in Eastern Myanmar, which examines the conduct of the Myanmar military during an offensive that cleared and forcibly relocated civilian populations from conflict zones in eastern Myanmar.

In a memorandum released on March, 24, Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic stated that the Myanmar military must reform policies and practices that threaten civilian populations in the country.

On June 24, 2013, family members of those killed in government-planned massacres in Bolivia in 2003 filed an amended complaint, with extensive new allegations that the defendants, former President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and former Defense Minister Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, had devised a plan to kill thousands of civilians months in advance of the violence. The family members are being represented by a team of lawyers, including Tyler Giannini and Susan Farbstein of Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic,

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.

With the help of Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, Filipina-American Melissa Roxas has filed a submission with the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture seeking justice for the abduction and torture she suffered in the Philippines in 2009.