Human Rights

For Bonnie Docherty, a lecturer on law and a senior instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, the battle to protect civilians from suffering caused by armed conflicts continues.

The Harvard Muslim Law Students Association (MLSA) started a social media campaign to create a network of mentorship for Muslim American youth who are harmed and discouraged by Islamophobic sentiment. Using the hashtag #yourvoicematters, the students hope to generate a positive dialogue focused on reclaiming and celebrating Muslim identity.

During a commencement address at the University of Michigan, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow urged students to address the serious challenges of our time and take action against injustice by being 'upstanders' instead of bystanders.

Supreme Court justices, performance art, student protests and a vice president. A look back at 2015, highlights of the people who visited, events that took place and everyday life at Harvard Law School.

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.

Taking a leaf out of the American Civil Rights Movement’s book, Roma rights activists undertook a legal battle in European courts to challenge the pervasive discrimination that has kept them living on the fringes of society.

Accompanied by his lawyers Lisa Kavanaugh '00 and Andrea Petersen, Victor Rosario--a man who served 32 years in prison for a crime he said he didn’t commit--discussed his case, the state of criminal forensics, and innocence litigation at Harvard Law School.

It was with tragic timeliness that Professor Patrick Weil discussed “After the Paris Attacks: What Is the Future for French Society?” on Wednesday, November 18 at Harvard Law School.

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.

During a conversation Thursday with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow at Wasserstein Hall, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy LL.B. '61 addressed a wide variety of topics, including the American criminal justice system, teaching law abroad, and his opinion on being described as the high court's swing vote on major issues.

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.

Brandeis University has selected Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow as the winner of the 2015-16 Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize, presented annually to a person whose body of published work reflects scholarly excellence and makes a lasting contribution to racial, ethnic or religious relations.

In January 2010, Martha Minow, then the new dean of Harvard Law School, taught a seminar examining the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Bolstering that effort was her co-teacher, Alex Whiting, who later that year would begin a three-year tenure at the ICC, managing first investigations and then prosecutions for the office. The other co-teacher was the ICC’s first chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

Doctors who provide medical assistance to people labeled terrorists are increasingly vulnerable to prosecution in the United States and other Western democracies, according to a law briefing by the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC).

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.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, HLS Professor Alex Whiting and Syracuse University College of Law Assistant Professor Cora True-Frost have published a volume of essays that examine the role and the legacy of the first prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno Ocampo.

Mohammad Hamdy, an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law, was selected by the American Society of International Law (ASIL) as a 2015 Helton Fellow.

Global Access in Action (GAiA), an initiative of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, hosted a workshop on July 10 to explore lessons from the recent Ebola outbreak for improving future preparedness for public health crises.

At a talk hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet Society on June 23, Mitali Thakor, a PhD student in MIT’s HASTS program and a Berkman affiliate, discussed her findings on techniques and strategies for preventing and prosecuting child exploitation and human trafficking, and how new digital approaches to addressing these issues effect young people online.

Since at least 1983, when Harvard Law student Evan Wolfson ’83 wrote a third-year paper exploring a human rights argument for same-sex marriage, Harvard Law School has participated in anticipating, shaping, critiquing, analyzing and guiding the long path toward marriage equality.