Human Rights

Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65 will testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on November 6 regarding the “Human Rights of Unparented Children and International Adoption Policies” in the Americas. The hearing comes after a request made by the HLS Child Advocacy Program (CAP) and the Center for Adoption Policy.

Samuel Bagenstos ’93, deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, U.S. Department of Justice, spoke last week at HLS on the Obama administration’s focus on enforcing disability rights at home and supporting them abroad.

n an interview with Rahim Kanani, a research associate at Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Amaka Megwalu ’10 discusses her insights on the aid industry in Africa and the Gacaca Court System in Rwanda. Megwalu has worked on development and post-conflict reconstruction in Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia.

Last year, Matthew F. Wells ’09 traveled through Sierra Leone visiting more than two dozen artisanal diamond mines, under the auspices of the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School.

“From 2007 to 2008, the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan’s ongoing conflict rose 40 percent, according to U.N. figures.” So begins the report co-written by Erica Gaston ’07, with Rebecca Wright, during Gaston’s Henigson Fellowship year in Afghanistan, which started in January 2008.

On Friday July 24, President Barack Obama ’91 announced that the United States will sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, joining more than 100 other nations. The Harvard Law School Project on Disability played a prominent role in the negotiations leading up to the convention, which is the first global human rights treaty of the 21st century.

Harvard Law School was well represented in the inaugural Qatar Law Forum in late May—an unprecedented gathering of legal luminaries from some 35 nations, including 12 chief justices, the presidents of the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and prominent legal officials, legal educators and practitioners. (Watch video from the forum.)

Support for International Adoption principles is growing, says HLS Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, citing endorsements for Policy Statement and the recent Malawi ruling in the Madonna case.

A new report issued by the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School calls for the UN Security Council to act on human rights abuses in Burma. The report, “Crimes in Burma,” comes in the wake of renewed international attention due to the continued persecution of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi.

In a May 10 New York Times editorial “Celebrity Adoptions and the Real World,” HLS Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65, the faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, was one of six contributors who shared their opinions on international adoption and what the standard should be for allowing international adoptions.

On April 15, Venezuelan Supreme Court Justice Vegas Torrealba discussed his country’s justice system during a talk entitled, “Role of Human Rights, Gender Equality, and Race in Venezuelan Law.” The event was sponsored by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

In an April 14 speech at Harvard Law School, Major General Antonio M. Taguba called for an independent commission to investigate the Bush Administration for war crimes. Taguba is the author of the controversial 2004 “Taguba Report” exposing the detainee abuse occurring at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program has been working since 2005 on corporate Alien Tort Statute (ATS) litigation involving human rights abuses committed in apartheid South Africa. 

The following op-ed, “Rights case gone wrong,” co-written by Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith and Duke Law School Professor Curtis Bradley, was published in the April 19, 2009, edition of the Washington Post.

Dean of Yale Law School Harold Hongju Koh ’80 has been named legal adviser of the U.S. Department of State, President Barack Obama ’91 has announced. Kate Stith ’77 has been appointed acting dean of Yale Law School.

The Harvard Human Rights Journal brought leading scholars and practitioners to campus on February 20 for a symposium on the doctrine known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

The following op-ed, “We need a truth commission to uncover Bush-era wrongdoing,” by HLS Clinical Professor James Cavallaro appeared in the Feb. 20 issue of The Christian Science Monitor. Cavallaro is executive director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.

For those who work in the field of human rights during times of war, Afghanistan is the front line. For the past year, Erica Gaston ’07 has lived in Kabul as a Henigson Human Rights Fellow, assisting victims of the war and studying the conflict.

James Cavallaro, clinical professor and executive director of the Human Rights Program, has litigated numerous cases before the Inter-American Court, Latin America’s human rights court.

Christopher Rogers ’09 has spent the better part of the past year in HLS’s International Human Rights Clinic working on issues related to cluster munitions, particularly surrounding the creation of the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

On Nov. 20, Harvard Law School and Facing History and Ourselves co-sponsored a conference, “Hope, Critique & Possibility: Universal Rights in Societies of Difference,” to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.