Center Chair gives keynote talk in Brazil Supreme Court’s seminar on structural litigation

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT

Center Chair gives keynote talk in Brazil Supreme Court’s Seminar on structural litigation

On October 7, 2024 as part of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice’s ongoing academic exchange with Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF), Professor César Rodríguez-Garavito gave a keynote talk in the seminar “Structural Litigation: Advances and Challenges” in Brasilia.

The event was organized by STF Chief Justice Luís Roberto Barroso as well as other high-ranking Brazilian judges, including STF’s Deputy Chief Justice Edson Fachin and the Federal High Court’s Chief Justice Antonio Herman Benjamin.

In his opening remarks, Minister Barroso highlighted the significance of structural litigation—that is, constitutional cases addressing systemic policy issues that affect the rights of large groups. Among ongoing structural cases before the Brazilian Supreme Court are those dealing with violations of Indigenous rights in the Amazon, prison overcrowding, and police violence in informal settlements. He underscored that this emerging area is central to the Brazilian judiciary, urging judges to proactively identify such issues and ensure that relevant governmental institutions develop and implement effective solutions. Other judges on the panel echoed the importance of the judiciary’s authority to act in these matters and emphasized the need for effective monitoring of structural court decisions.

The seminar also featured discussions on the judiciary’s role in resolving complex structural conflicts. Professor Rodríguez-Garavito shared insights on how structural cases are handled in comparative law, focusing on their impacts and potential applications to climate litigation. He highlighted the STF’s contributions to the protection of constitutional rights through structural rulings and suggested ways forward to ensure the legitimacy and effective implementation of the Court’s rulings.

The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice’s participation in this seminar is one of many initiatives planned with high courts from around the world for the upcoming year, underscoring the Center’s commitment to supporting judicial engagement in innovative legal areas while protecting rights and advancing justice for all.

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November 7, 2024 Youssef Farhat Event Summary

Emma Crowe

Emma Crowe
Research Scholar
The Earth Rights Research & Action

October 19, 2024 Bryan Gasaway Profile

Sam Moon

Sam Moon
Operations Manager

Prevention Project

Sam Moon (they/them) joined the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice in 2024 as the Operations Manager for the Prevention Project, where they oversee financial tracking, grants management, event planning, and communications.

Before joining the project, Sam gained diverse experience in education, teaching business fundamentals, accounting, and economics to high school students. They also held various operational roles, including Director of Operations for an animal rights nonprofit focused on investigations, legal advocacy, and food system transformation. Most recently, Sam serves as Managing Director of a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring sustainable access to food, water, and work.

Sam holds an MBA from Montclair State University, a Bachelor of Science in Management from Northeastern University, and a Nonprofit Management Certificate from a local community college.
In addition to their professional work, Sam serves as Treasurer on the Board of Directors for a farmed animal sanctuary and aspires to study environmental and animal law through a social rights lens.

October 4, 2024 Bryan Gasaway Profile

Forming a High Level Expert Group to Strengthen Global Gender Justice

INEQUALITIES

Forming a High Level Expert Group to Strengthen Global Gender Justice

In a groundbreaking initiative to address gender-based injustices, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law together with the American Society of International Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Women, Law, and Leadership Project and the University of Oxford’s Bonavero Institute for Human Rights formed the High-Level Expert Group on Gender Persecution and Gender Apartheid.

The High-Level Expert Group is led by Baroness Helena Kennedy of The Shaws KC, a Member of the House of Lords and founder of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights; Catherine Amirfar, Partner and Co-Chair of the International Disputes Resolution Group and Public International Law Group at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP; Rangita de Silva de Alwis, a Senior Fellow at Penn Carey Law and Member of CEDAW; and Ghizal Haress, a former Ombudsperson for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and visiting professor at the University of Toronto.

The group is comprised of an esteemed array of global experts and human rights defenders who bring to bear a wealth of knowledge and expertise, including José E. Alvarez, NYU School of Law Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law.

The High-Level Expert Group seeks to address gaps in the existing international legal framework addressing gender-based crimes, including by examining the basis for gender apartheid and gender persecution under international law, developing the definitions and framework for addressing these crimes, advancing accountability efforts against perpetrators of gender-based crimes, and centering the voices of victims and those directly affected by gender apartheid and gender persecution.

Through this newly-launched initiative, NYU Law students have the opportunity through research to be part of the ongoing efforts to achieve justice for victims of gender-based apartheid and/or persecution around the world. A myriad of legal research assignments on topics ranging from gender-based crimes under international law to human rights protections against gender-based discrimination will be carried under the direct supervision of pro-bono attorneys at a local NY firm supervised by Prof. Alvarez.

August 28, 2024 Youssef Farhat Student Program

Seizing the opportunity to improve Uganda’s national digital ID system

TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Seizing the opportunity to improve Uganda’s national digital ID system

In 2014, Uganda introduced its first national digital ID system. Now, a decade later, as millions of ID cards are set to expire, the Government is planning a significant upgrade of the system and will soon begin a mass enrollment exercise to register all unregistered Ugandans. Given that many exclusions and harms have arisen from the current digital ID system, the Government’s plans to roll out a new system represent a key opportunity to learn from past experiences and ensure that the new system is more inclusive, equitable, and privacy-protecting.

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In this document, we raise 5 urgent recommendations that the Government must adopt to put Uganda on the path towards a digital ID system that centers inclusion, equity, privacy, transparency, and accountability. Drawing on research and lessons learned from Uganda’s existing national digital ID system, as well as incorporating lessons from other countries’ experiences and from international best practices, we recommend that the Government should:

Improve communication and transparency about plans for the new digital ID;
Proactively facilitate participation, particularly of vulnerable communities and of civil society organizations, in policy and design choices;
Conduct a comprehensive Human Rights Impact Assessment to identify risks arising from the ID system and the registration process;
Take steps to ensure that marginalized and vulnerable groups are proactively included in enrollment and renewal processes;
Put in place concrete plans for a transition period to ensure that no rights are violated as the Government works to introduce new digital components

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list but instead focuses on short-term, actionable recommendations that will help concretely improve the Government’s approach in the immediate term and avoid further entrenching the well-documented problems and weaknesses that have affected the current system.

July 25, 2024.

July 24, 2024 Youssef Farhat Product

New Casebook—International Human Rights by P. Alston available in an Open Access Publication

HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

New Casebook—International Human Rights by P. Alston available in an Open Access Publication

Philip Alston’s International Human Rights textbook is now available free of charge in a comprehensively revised edition and on an Open Access basis starting July 8, 2024.

Digital Access

This book examines the world of contemporary human rights, including legal norms, political contexts and moral ideals. It acknowledges the regime’s strengths and weaknesses, and focuses on today’s principal challenges. These include the struggles against resurgent racism and anti-gender ideology, the implications of new technologies for fact-finding and many other parts of the regime, the continuing marginality of economic, social and cultural rights, radical inequality, climate change, and the evermore central role of the private sector.

The boundaries of the subject have steadily expanded as the post-World War II regime has become an indelible part of the legal, political and moral landscape. Given the breadth and complexity of the regime, the book takes an interdisciplinary and critical approach.

… imaginative and stimulating materials with thought-provoking commentary… a wonderful teaching tool, as well as a valuable starting point for research.

Judge Hilary Charlesworth, Judge of the International Court of Justice.

Features include:

A focus on current issues such as new technologies, climate change, counter-terrorism, reparations, sanctions, and universal jurisdiction;
Expanded focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, disability and other forms of discrimination and the backlash against efforts to combat them;
Introductory chapters that provide the necessary overview of international law;
An interdisciplinary approach that puts human rights issues into their broader political, economic, and cultural contexts;
Diverse and critical perspectives dealt with throughout;
Sections dealing with political economy of human rights and the challenge of growing inequality;
Issues of international humanitarian law are widely reflected; and
Focus on current situations in Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar, Venezuela, and others

Major themes that run through the book include the colonial and imperial objectives often pursued in the name of human rights, evolving notions of autonomy and sovereignty, the changing configuration of the public-private divide in human rights ordering, the escalating tensions between international human rights and national security, and the striking evolution of ideas about the nature and purposes of the regime itself.

This book is a successor to previous volumes entitled International Human Rights in Context (1996, 2000 and 2008, all co-authored with Henry Steiner and in 2008 also with Ryan Goodman) and International Human Rights: Text and Materials (2013, co-authored with Ryan Goodman). “All four volumes were published by Oxford University Press, and I am grateful to them for reverting all rights to the author in order to enable this Open Access publication” says Alston.

The comprehensively revised edition will be available free of charge and can be downloaded in either a single pdf file for the entire book or separate files for each of the eighteen chapters.

June 26, 2024 Youssef Farhat Product

Recommendations to Funders to Improve Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Human Rights Field

HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Recommendations to Funders to Improve Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Human Rights Field

Improving and maintaining well-being is essential to individual health, to organizational functioning, and to the sustainability and effectiveness of the human rights field as a whole. There are many concrete, immediately actionable reforms that are achievable in the near-term and which address a variety of causes of distress, or which can support efforts to transform the field over the long term. Such steps should be taken while the human rights field works toward deep transformation.

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Human rights advocacy can be a source of significant joy, purpose, political agency, belonging, and community. Yet advocates can also experience harms, and trauma in their efforts to advance justice and equality, including those caused by heavy workloads, time pressures, discrimination and bullying in the workplace, vicarious exposure to trauma and human rights abuse, and direct experience of threats and attacks. Advocates can experience suffering, sometimes very severe, as a result, including demotivation, alienation, anxiety, fear, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. How advocates experience their work and any resulting harms can vary widely, and may be highly contextual and culturally specific.

Improving and maintaining well-being is essential to individual health, to organizational functioning, and to the sustainability and effectiveness of the human rights field as a whole.

Positively transforming mental health and well-being in the human rights field will require significant reforms and both structural changes and close attention to the contextually-specific needs of individual advocates and organizations. The causes and dynamics at play are complex, and there are no quick fixes that can address the cultural shifts required. As efforts are taken to improve well-being, it is important that the field avoids tick-the-box or commodified approaches. Improving the wellbeing of human rights advocates requires a holistic response and a movement-wide prioritization of well-being, with careful attention to context, culture, and the diverse needs of advocates and organizations.

Recognition of the deeply-rooted problems requiring radical change or of the complexities of the issues and the difficulty of defining a clear set of recommendations applicable across the board should not operate as an excuse to take no action now to improve well-being. There are many concrete, immediately actionable reforms that are achievable in the near-term and which address a variety of causes of distress, or which can support efforts to transform the field over the long term. Such steps should be taken while the human rights field works toward deep transformation. Some of these steps include the following recommended actions, which are drawn from our research with advocates around the world.

June 25, 2024 Dev Account Product

Carbon Markets, Forests and Rights: An Introductory Series for Indigenous Peoples

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT

Carbon Markets, Forests and Rights

An Introductory Series for Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous peoples are experiencing a rush of interest in their lands and territories from actors involved in carbon markets. Many indigenous communities have expressed that to make informed decisions about how to engage with carbon markets, they need accessible information about what these markets are, and how participating in them may affect their rights.

In response to this demand for information, the Global Justice Clinic and the Forest Peoples Programme have developed a series of introductory materials about carbon markets. The materials were initially developed for GJC partner the South Rupununi District Council in Guyana and have been adapted for a global audience.

English

French

Spanish

Indonesian

Portuguese

The explainer materials can be read in any order:

Explainer 1 introduces key concepts that are essential background to understanding carbon markets. It introduces what climate change is, what the carbon cycle and carbon dioxide is, and the link between carbon dioxide, forests and climate change.
Explainer 2 outlines what carbon markets and carbon credits are, and provides a brief introduction to why these markets are developing and how they function
Explainer 3 focuses on indigenous peoples’ rights and carbon markets. It highlights some of the particular risks that carbon markets pose to indigenous peoples and communities. It also highlights key questions communities should ask themselves as they consider how to engage with or respond to carbon markets
Explainer 4 provides an overview of the key environmental critiques and concerns around carbon markets
Explainer 5 provides a short introduction to ART-TREES. ART-TRESS is an institution and standard that is involved in ‘certifying’ carbon credits and that is gaining a lot of attention internationally.

English

French

Spanish

Indonesian

Portugese

May 30, 2024 Dev Account Product

The Time is Now: Mexico Must Grant Haitians Refugee Protections under the Cartagena Declaration

HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The Time is Now: Mexico Must Grant Haitians Refugee Protections under the Cartagena

This report published by Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova A.C. and the Global Justice Clinic shows why Mexico–and, by extension, all countries that have signed the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees–must grant Haitians refugee status.

English

Kreyòl

Español

Haitians living outside of Haiti often lack access to basic human rights, face anti-Black discrimination, and in many countries, live under the threat of being sent back to Haiti. Pathways to legal status in other countries are essential for Haitians seeking safety, but governments rarely grant legal status to Haitians and, when they do, protections are often temporary.

Mexico is one of the many countries that Haitian people have migrated to in the past decade. Tens of thousands of Haitians enter Mexico every year. Mexico has incorporated the Cartagena Declaration–which provides a broader definition of “refugee” than the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1966 Protocol–into its domestic law, legally binding it to grant refugee status to people who, based on an objective analysis of the circumstances in their country of origin, meet the elements of the declaration. This report establishes how three of the Declaration’s elements–generalized violence, massive violations of human rights, and other circumstances that seriously disturb public order–are pervasive in Haiti.

Advocacy

The Global Justice Clinic and Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova A.C. launched the report in Mexico City in late April 2024, and met with representatives of Mexican government agencies, including the Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados (Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance) and the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (Secretariat of Foreign Affairs) to urge them to apply the Cartagena Declaration to Haitian nationals.

Additional resources

May 23, 2024 Youssef Farhat Uncategorized

Mexico Must Extend Cartagena’s Protection Principles to Haitian Asylum Seekers

HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Mexico Must Extend Cartagena’s Protection Principles to Haitian Asylum Seekers

Intersecting crises in Haiti have left tens of thousands of Haitians no choice but to flee their country, and Haitians who fled in prior years are unable to return home. A report by Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova A.C. and the Global Justice Clinic shows why Mexico–and, by extension, all countries that have signed the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees–must grant Haitians refugee status.

The report comes at a critical moment. Haiti currently faces extraordinary violence and a near-complete collapse of state institutions. Armed groups killed more than 1,500 people in the first three months of 2024, displaced more than 360,000 people within Haiti’s borders, and seized control of the capital, ports, and hospitals. Sexual violence is endemic. Escalated violence and targeted attacks on government infrastructure in March 2024 plunged Haiti into a two-months long state of emergency.

Between 2021 and 2023, Mexico approved approximately 5,200 out of more than 110,000 Haitians’ refugee applications — representing a 4.6% approval rate. In those years Haitians were also the nationality that filed the most refugee applications in Mexico.

This disproportionately low approval rate of Haitian applicants, who by any measure face persecution and extremely challenging conditions at home, flies in the face of Mexico’s legal obligations to establish nondiscriminatory migratory procedures.

Enrique Vidal, Interim Director of CDH Fray Matías.

Recognizing Haitian nationals as refugees under the Cartagena Declaration is one necessary step to correct the systemic denial of Haitians’ rights. In doing so, Mexico could pave the way for greater protection of human rights in the hemisphere.

Mexico has the opportunity to be a leader in protecting the rights of Haitian people in the region. Governments throughout the region must assess country conditions objectively, and cease to discriminate against the Haitian people.

Gabrielle Apollon, Director of the Haitian Immigrant Rights Project at the Global Justice Clinic, in light of the upcoming 40th anniversary of the signing of the Cartagena Declaration.

GJC and CDH Fray Matías launched the report, in Spanish, in Mexico City in late April 2024. They met with representatives of Mexican government agencies, including the Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados (Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance) and the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (Secretariat of Foreign Affairs) to urge them to apply the Cartagena Declaration to Haitian nationals. GJC and Fray Matías staff also observed firsthand the inhumane living conditions that many Haitian migrants and asylum-seekers endure in migrant encampments in Mexico. These conditions underscore the urgency of providing greater refugee protections for Haitians.

Today, GJC and CDH Fray Matías make this report available in English. Although the Mexican government remains the primary advocacy target, this report presents the case for all signatories to the Cartagena Declaration to extend refugee protection to Haitian nationals, and for countries throughout the Hemisphere to provide maximum protections to Haitian migrants and asylum-seekers.

May 24, 2024. For more information, please contact Gabrielle Apollon (English and Kreyòl) or Ellie Happel (English, Kreyòl, Spanish).

May 23, 2024 Youssef Farhat Uncategorized