CHRGJ Faculty Director and Co-Chair, Professor Philip Alston is the current UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. The Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights performs several roles: developing a better understanding of the relationship, in both theory and practice, between human rights and the scourge of extreme poverty; influencing agenda-setting and policy-making at both the national and international levels; undertaking country-level advisory work, in the context of invited visits and also when major violations are alleged to have occurred; and giving a higher profile to these issues, through contributions to public debate, publications, and advocacy (Read more about the mandate on the website of OHCHR).

Using a multidimensional approach to poverty, the incidence of extreme poverty around the world is staggering. According to UNDP’s Human Development Report 2014, over 2.2 billion people, more than 15 percent of the world’s population, “are either near or living in multidimensional poverty.” Poverty is an urgent human rights concern. For those living in extreme poverty, many human rights are out of reach. The elimination of extreme poverty should thus not be seen as a question of charity, but as a pressing human rights issue.

Since he was appointed in June 2014, Prof. Alston has stressed the importance of relying on a human rights based approach when confronting extreme poverty. In his first report to the General Assembly, for instance, Alston called on Governments to embrace the United Nations Social Protection Floor Initiative—to guarantee the right to social protection. Prof. Alston has also criticized the World Bank’s unwillingness to take into account human rights in its development work. Together with 27 other UN Special Procedures, he has written a letter to World Bank President Jim Yong Kim about the lack of any meaningful reference to human rights in the World Bank’s draft new Safeguards policies. Alston has also raised a range of specific issues with the governments concerned, including debt restructuring in Argentina, the reduction of the minimum wage in Guatemala, the impact on the poor of water policies in Detroit, and the failure to provide emergency assistance for homeless migrants in the Netherlands.

Pablo de Greiff was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to serve as the first Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence in 2012.  At CHRGJ he is the Director of the Project on Transitional Justice.

The Project on Transitional Justice brings together teaching, research, conferences, and student field work on criminal trials, truth commissions, institutional reform and reparations programs in transitional democracies, ranging from East Timor and Iraq to Sierra Leone and Peru and, most recently, those countries impacted by the “Arab Spring.”

The Project on Transitional Justice includes two seminar courses which examine both the conceptual underpinnings of this field and advanced issues in transitional justice. Pablo de Greiff, who concurrently serves as the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, directs the project and will teach the advanced seminar in the spring of 2016.

CHRGJ encourages student engagement with transitional justice issues through the Transitional Justice Leadership Program, and a comprehensive range of transitional justice fellowships, which enable students to undertake research and fieldwork on criminal trials, truth commissions, institutional reform and reparations programs in transitional democracies.

In collaboration with one of its key partner organizations, the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), the Center also hosts the Annual Transitional Justice Lecture, which provides a prominent platform for distinguished persons working on transitional justice issues to deliver a scholarly paper on important developments in the field. Past speakers have included Prof. José Zalaquett, who delivered the inaugural Annual Lecture; the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour; the current President of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner; President emeritus of the Open Society Institute, Aryeh Neier, among others.