Recent Highlights

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  HLS Human Rights Program issues new report on abuses in Burma

  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.

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  Bartholet: Focus on the Child’s Human Rights

  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. 

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  Responsibility to Protect Takes Center Stage

  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).
  

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  Cavallaro: We need a truth commission to uncover Bush-era wrongdoing

  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.

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  Gaston documents victims of war in Afghanistan

  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.

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  In a major new study, recommendations for reforming the way human rights courts work

  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.

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  At HLS, a major conference on human rights in a world of growing diversity

  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.

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  Minow, Heymann: International Criminal Court should decide on genocide in Darfur

  IS THERE a legal basis for the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan for genocide?

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  Jeffrey Sachs urges students to represent the voiceless

  Lawyers and leaders must do a better job of recognizing the intermeshed dilemmas posed by an overcrowded planet and an increasingly interconnected globe. That was the message delivered by world renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs in a recent lecture at Harvard Law School.

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  Power urges international community to fight “lawlessness”

  The international legal community needs to make “lawlessness” a top priority, said human rights scholar Samantha Power ’99 during a speech at Celebration 55: The Women’s Leadership Summit at Harvard Law School.

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  Lawyers for the Dammed

  In 1993, Vietnam began building a dam on its portion of the Se San River. It was intended to provide hydroelectric power for its citizens, but had downstream effects in villages along the Se San in northeastern Cambodia that the original environmental impact assessment did not anticipate. In 2005, Tyler Giannini, the clinical director of the law school’s Human Rights Program, and students from the International Human Rights Clinic traveled to riverside villages in Cambodia to investigate the dam’s effects. They found that water surges had drowned people and animals, depleted fish populations, damaged property, and rendered fishing and panning for gold dangerous.