promoting innovative ideas and practices.
The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice is a leading action-research hub that contributes to the global human rights project through scholarship, education, field building, advocacy, and legal practice. Across a wide range of issue areas and projects, we collaborate closely with partners from diverse geographies and disciplines on the new ideas, practices, and strategies that are needed to address existential challenges to human rights and global justice.
reimagining human rights for the twenty-first century.
We nurture ideas, actions, and connections that promote rights-based solutions to ecological emergencies, technological disruptions, deepening inequalities, threats to democracy and peace, and other urgent challenges to global governance and justice. We pursue initiatives that expand and catalyze the collective capacity of the human rights field. We deepen collaborations among communities of thought and practice from around the world, train future human rights thinkers and doers, and disseminate promising approaches to global justice research and advocacy.
staying current.
Events
MOTH Festival of Ideas & FORGE Gathering at NYU Law
A dynamic week of interdisciplinary exploration, innovation, and collaboration.
The Center hosted a weeklong series of events through the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Festival of Ideas 2025 and the Future of Human Rights and Governance (FORGE) Gathering 2025, bringing together global thought leaders, advocates, and scholars to explore the most pressing issues of our time, like climate change and biodiversity loss. Taking place at NYU Law, this dynamic week of innovation, and collaboration ran from March 10 to March 15, 2025.
Hosted by the Earth Rights Action and Research (TERRA) and the FORGE programs, both gatherings include closed-door, interactive scholar-practitioner sessions, as well as sessions open to the public in the evenings.
Highlights
César Rodríguez-Garavito awarded Future Observatory Fellowship
Climate & Environment
César Rodríguez-Garavito is one of four pioneering researchers awarded a Future Observatory Fellowship for his work on More-Than-Human-Rights to explore the intersection of design and the natural world. The work will be featured in a major exhibition at the Design Museum, opening June 2025, highlighting cutting-edge installations.
Highlights
The legal tussle to hold corporate polluters accountable for climate loss and damage
Climate & Environment
It took years for countries to agree on any tool for addressing loss and damage. A voluntary fund, when it was finally set up in 2022, is still the subject of terse negotiation and the money committed to it falls far short of the hundreds of billions that are needed. This has left an “accountability gap” between polluter governments and polluter corporations, according to a new report published by the Climate Law Accelerator.
Highlights
Urgen cambios para enfrentar el calor extremo
Climate & Environment
Ashley Otilia Nemeth, director of programs at the Climate Law Accelerator, spoke at the annual Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands Extreme Heat Summit. She detailed the role extreme heat is playing in recent domestic policies and ongoing litigation and was later interviewed by news station WIPR regarding extreme heat workplace safety legislation at the state level.
Highlights
Community-led monitoring in Guyana essential to Indigenous justice systems and access to justice
Climate & Environment
A recent submission by the South Rupununi District Council – the representative institution of the Wapichan people – and the Global Justice Clinic highlights the importance of community monitoring to Indigenous justice systems and access to justice, and calls for greater government recognition and collaboration with Indigenous led community monitoring efforts.
Open Global Rights
Recent flooding in Port-de-Paix highlights the urgency of climate disorder and its uneven impacts in Haiti
Climate & Environment
Global North actors responsible for Haiti’s climate vulnerability must act to address the worst consequences of climate change. Written by Ellie Happel and Sherwanda Maxime for Open Global Rights.
Highlights
Pablo de Greiff briefs UN Security Council on Ukraine
Prevention & Conflict
Pablo de Greiff, Commissioner of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, addressed the United Nations Security Council during an Arria Formula meeting.
Read UN Commission of Inquiry Statement on the third-year mark
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