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.
International Human Rights
by Philip Alston
The 2026 update of the International Human Rights is now available for digital download. The textbook remains a free, open-access textbook designed for students, educators, and global practitioners taking a critical at international human rights law.
Across 18 chapters, this version examines the world of contemporary human rights, including legal norms, political contexts and underlying ethical and moral ideals. It acknowledges the regime’s strengths and weaknesses, and focuses on today’s principal challenges. These include authoritarianism, radical inequality, resurgent racism, the rise of anti-gender ideology, artificial intelligence, the continuing marginality of economic, social and cultural rights, climate change, and the evermore central role of the private sector.
Events
MOTH Festival of Ideas, London 2026
Climate & Environment
The MOTH Festival of Ideas convened in May 2026 in London, dedicated to exploring the rich and rapidly evolving field of inquiry and action pursuing efforts to bring the more-than-human world into the ambit of moral, legal, and social concern.
Resources
Climate Change on Trial | Book & Toolkit
Climate & Environment
Can human rights help combat climate change? A global wave of climate litigation says yes, with a new landmark book by César Rodríguez-Garavito and educational toolkit from the Climate Law Accelerator at NYU Law spotlighting the evolution and power of rights-based legal action.
Resources
Commons on Machines, Policy, Automation, and Society
Technology & Human Rights
A new initiative dedicated to bridging the growing gap between rapidly advancing AI and the legal, ethical, and policy frameworks needed to govern it. Critically, we are committed to a model of inclusion that goes beyond established expert circles.
Resources
The Whale Protection and Legal Personhood Declaration
Climate & Environment
To bring the Declaration to life, A collaboration with the MOTH Program that brought together Indigenous leadership, legal expertise and innovation, and cutting-edge whale communication science.
Resources
Inside the Prevention Project’s First UN Integration Workshop
Prevention & Conflict
The Prevention Project hosted its first integration and implementation workshop in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Department of Political Affairs (DPPA) Joint Programme on Building National Capacities for Conflict Prevention.
Resources
Legal & Ethical Principles for Nonhuman Animal Communication Technologies.
Climate & Environment
The PEPP Framework (Prepare, Engage, Prevent, and Protect) is the first set of legal and ethical principles for the responsible development and deployment of nonhuman animal communication technologies (or NACTs) — tools and systems that use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced robotics to record, analyze, and potentially translate animal communications.
learn, connect, or contribute.
Explore our platform to find resources, stay informed about events, connect with like-minded individuals and organizations, and discover how you can play a role in shaping the future of human rights and global justice.
