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.

Photo of Spermwhale
Amanda Cotton (CETI)

Highlights

What If We Understood What Animals Are Saying? 

The More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program and Project CETI have joined forces to explore how advances in our understanding of sperm whale communications could lead to positive legal change. Their findings are presented in a new article forthcoming in Ecology Law Quarterly and published on New York University School of Law’s pre-print site. The paper explores the growing fields of artificial intelligence and bioacoustics and their potential to reshape human and nonhuman law by challenging long-held assumptions about animal communication. 

Tegwen McKenzie (FORGExMOTH)
Tegwen McKenzie (FORGExMOTH)

Highlights

A dynamic week of interdisciplinary exploration, innovation, and collaboration

Future of Rights & Governance

The Center hosted a weeklong series of events through the MOTH Festival of Ideas and the FORGE Gathering, bringing together global thought leaders, advocates, and scholars to explore the most pressing issues of our time. 

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Artwork that shows natural elements including flowers, tigers, leaves, frogs and waterlilies.
Nefazta (MOTH)

Highlights

Crossing The River Podcast: Season 2

Climate & Environment

In Season 2 of Crossing the River Podcast, produced jointly by TERRA NYU Law and Colombia-based 070, we listen to more voices of Indigenous leaders who defend life on Earth every day, in their own words, because they are the protagonists of their own stories.

Go to episodes 

Photo of César Rodríguez-Gravito
Jake Olson (MOTH)

Highlights

How to use the law to save the planet

Climate & Environment

In this episode of Against All Odds, César Rodríguez-Garavito details groundbreaking victories in climate litigation and law, highlighting the inspiring, long-term work of activists ranging from European grandmothers to Indigenous youth.

Watch Episode

Landscape of a field/land in Guayana with blue skies.

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.

View submission

Falco (Pixabay)
Falco (Pixabay)

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.

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IMG_7988

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.

Watch interview

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