Human Rights

Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic has released a new report, "Securing Status: Syrian refugees and the documentation of legal status, identity, and family relationships in Jordan," that details the challenges Syrian refugees living outside refugee camps encounter obtaining official documents from the Government of Jordan.

This fall, Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner, Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and Vincent Schiraldi, senior research fellow and director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, are teaching a new Harvard course that will help students become part of the effort to reform the nation’s criminal justice system.

In a recent conversation at HLS with Dean Martha Minow, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and U.N. special envoy on El Niño and climate change, told the story of how she came to be an “Angry Granny” on the topic of climate change, starting with her discussions with people in the most deeply affected communities.

A photo exhibit featuring portraits of legal scholars who represent traditionally marginalized voices will be displayed in Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall from Nov. 17-22.

The Football Players Health Study at Harvard University today released a set of legal and ethical recommendations to address a series of structural factors that affect NFL player health. The Football Players Health Study is a research initiative composed of several ongoing studies examining the health and wellbeing of NFL players.

In October, Kristin Fleschner ’14 returned to the Harvard Law campus to share with current students her work in disability rights and her experiences as a blind lawyer. Her talk was followed by a showing of “Blind Ambition,” a documentary that she produced as a 2L with the support of the Dean of Students Office.

Janet Reno ’63, the longest serving U.S. attorney general of the 20th century and the first woman to have ever held the post, died on Monday at age 78. Reno was nominated to the post of U.S. Attorney General by President Clinton in 1993 and she served for eight years, before stepping down in 2001.

With his recent gift of $1 million and a subsequent matching gift of $500,000 to support individual donations of up to $50,000 through December, Charles Thomas is hoping to make farm animals central to animal cruelty prevention.

In 1949, four years after the Nuremberg war crime trials began, the Harvard Law Library received the most complete set of documents from the Nazi prosecutions outside that of the National Archives; now, a small team is working on analyzing and digitizing the documents--often, a difficult and haunting task--for the HLS Nuremberg Trials Project.

In the summer of 2016, 19 students traveled to 13 countries through the Chayes International Public Service Fellowship Program. Chayes Fellows spend eight weeks working within the governments of developing nations, or with the inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations that support them.

Even when he was 5, Joel Motley '78 knew his late mother was doing important work; now, he has co-produced "The Trials of Constance Baker Motley," a short film about the woman who became the first black female Manhattan borough president, New York state senator, and federal judge.

In late October Harvard Law School celebrated National Pro Bono Week with a number of events to honor the outstanding work of lawyers who volunteer their time to help people in their communities.

In Nima, a large community in the center of Accra, Ghana, water flows through the plumbing system of a small human rights advocacy office for only a few hours each day. Professor Lucie White and some of the first students in Making Rights Real: the Ghana Project learned this the hard way.

Harvard Law Professor Samuel Moyn ’01 discusses the potential and the limitations of the human rights movement when it comes to creating just societies.

HLS hosted the fourth Celebration of Black Alumni in September, featuring the theme “Turning Vision into Action.” The actions of alumni who attended have resonated in courtrooms and classrooms, in elected office and the corner office, in communities and in the culture. The Bulletin spoke with five CBA participants about where their vision has led them and where they hope to yet go.

As a child, Raymond Atuguba was regularly confronted by the harsh realities of poverty in Ghana. His father, a civil servant posted to rural areas, owned the only car for miles around. “Every emergency was brought to our door. If the car was not functioning, people died—on a daily basis—because they could not get to the hospital,” recalls Atuguba. “When I grew up, I said, ‘No, this has to change.’”

South Africa has failed to meet its human rights obligations to address the environmental and health effects of gold mining in and around Johannesburg, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) said in a new report.

In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, Harvard Law School Professor Alex Whiting moderated a conversation between Ambassador Christian Wenaweser, permanent representative of Liechtenstein to the United Nations, and Harold Hongju Koh ’80, who served as legal adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

As part of Boston’s HUBweek, HLS Clinical Professor Susan Crawford addressed a gathering of more than 100 people and made the case for her new Responsive Communities Initiative, a three-pronged program aimed at addressing issues of social justice, civil liberties, and economic development involving high-speed Internet access and government use of data.

Last spring, the Criminal Justice Policy Program developed an initiative to provide representation to incarcerated people petitioning President Obama for clemency. Twenty-six Harvard Law students volunteered to work with a team of pro bono attorneys to represent clemency petitioners, in what has become the largest law student-based clemency initiative in the country.

The Child Advocacy Program (CAP) of Harvard Law School recently received a $250,000 gift from Children of All Nations (CAN). The gift, which will be distributed over five years, will provide funding to CAP to pursue its international human rights work on behalf of unparented children and their right to family.