Human Rights

Harvard Law School Professor Gerald Neuman ’80 has been elected to the Human Rights Committee, the premier treaty body in the UN human rights system. The committee monitors compliance by 166 states parties with their obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is part of the “International Bill of Rights.”

This summer, HLS students traveled to distant locations – in Burma, Sierra Leone, Budapest, The Netherlands, Bolivia, South Africa, Ireland and Argentina – to do human rights advocacy work.

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.

A U.N. advocate is fighting to protect children from armed conflicts

Within hours of the catastrophic earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Jan. 12, when so many felt helpless to intervene, a website powered by volunteers helped to inform humanitarian aid groups and even the U.S. State Department about the developing disaster.

On May 20, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that blanket disenfranchisement of people with disabilities is contrary to the European Convention of Human Rights.

Five Harvard Law School alumni, including Lecturer on Law and Clinical Instructor at the Human Rights Project Susan Farbstein ’04, have been selected as finalists for the 2010 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award, which is presented each year by the Public Justice foundation to an attorney or team of attorneys who have made the most outstanding contribution to the public interest through precedent-setting litigation.

The special rights guaranteed to First Nations receive inadequate attention in British Columbia when compared to mining interests, the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) at Harvard Law School said in a report released on June 7.

Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of a petition for certiorari in a major corporate Alien Tort Statute case, Presbyterian Church of Sudan v. Talisman Energy, Inc. The Clinic served as counsel on behalf of international law scholars and jurists to argue that those who knowingly aid and abet egregious human rights violations can be held liable under customary international law.

Award-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed J.D. ’84 will join the Harvard faculty in July 2010 as a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Gordon-Reed will also be the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Senior Foreign Policy Adviser in the Obama Administration and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power ’99 will be the 2010 Class Day speaker at HLS. Selected by this year’s Class Marshals, Power will address graduates on May 26 as part of Class Day.

"War Don Don," a film directed Rebecca Richman Cohen '07, will be shown at this year’s Independent Film Festival in Boston on April 24 at 2:30 p.m. at the Somerville Theater. The film examines the aftermath of the civil war in Sierra Leone and how the international justice system tries to address the atrocities that were committed, documenting the trial of Issa Sesay, a former rebel leader who eventually played a role in the peace negotiations.

Solitary confinement in federal prisons is detrimental to the human brain and to the overall health of prisoners: This was the assessment of Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.

As an impoverished youth in Kenya, Chris Mburu LL.M.’93 was threatened with expulsion from his primary school because he couldn’t afford the fees. A woman named Hilde Back decided to help, and wrote a check for $15 dollars to sponsor the Kenyan student for one term. Little did she know just how much Mburu’s life would be changed.

The HLS International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), under the direction of Clinical Director Tyler Giannini and Lecturer on Law Susan Farbstein, recently filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case Samantar v. Yousuf. 

At the southwestern tip of the Amazon, in Porto Velho, Rondônia, Brazil, stands Urso Branco, a prison notorious for deadly human rights violations. It’s nowhere anyone would choose to be. But it was into this dank, dark, and volatile world that Clara Long ’11, Fernando Delgado ’08, and James Cavallaro, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, insisted on going.

The U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida has ruled that the claims for crimes against humanity and extrajudicial killings could move forward in two related U.S. cases against former Bolivian President Gonzalo Daniel Sánchez de Lozada Sánchez Bustamante (Sánchez de Lozada) and former Bolivian Defense Minister Jose Carlos Sánchez Berzaín (Sánchez Berzaín). The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School is part of the legal team that filed the two complaints against Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín.

“Much of the world…focuses on the bad things that happen when kids get placed in international adoption. When you shut down international adoptions in order to address bad things which occasionally happen, what you do is commit monumental human rights violations.” That was the testimony of Harvard Law School Professor and Faculty Director of HLS’s Child Advocacy Program Elizabeth Bartholet ’65 before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Nov. 6.

In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the UN’s Human Rights Program, the UN’s highest human rights official, Navanethem Pillay, LL.M. ’82 S.J.D. ’88, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, came to Harvard Law School to discuss her current position as a human rights diplomat and how it differs from her previous roles as a judge and an impassioned activist.