Law School's Human Rights Program Marks 15 Years

September 16, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

By Ken Gewertz
Gazette Staff

The Law School's Human Rights Program (HRP) will celebrate its 15th anniversary with a day and a half of discussions and debates among activists and scholars. The panels, speeches, and other events will take place over the weekend of Sept. 18 and 19.

Program director Henry Steiner, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law, recently spoke about how the program has done in living up to its goals.

"When the program started in 1984, we hoped that it would develop deep roots in the Law School and become as much a part of legal education as other topics the school has long taught," Steiner said. "We wanted to draw students into this field as thinkers and activists, to promote scholarship on human rights that would be critical and helpful to the larger human rights movement. We wanted to bring home to our students the terrible problems of human rights violations around the world and get them to think hard about how problems develop and what can be done about them."

The Human Rights Program now attracts about 50 students and visiting fellows annually whom Steiner described as "hard core" in their commitment to human rights and perhaps another 50 "fellow travelers." About 200 students take one or another of the human rights courses the School offers.

Many alumni of the Program have become advocates in the human rights field and some have started important human rights organizations. Their activities, along with the publications produced by the Program and its alumni, have given HRP a high profile throughout the world.

"More students each year tell me they’ve chosen Harvard because of the nature of our Human Rights Program," Steiner said.

Pointing to the Program’s "15 years of striking achievement," Law School Dean Robert Clark said that HRP "has placed the Law School among the world’s leading academic institutions in advancing thought in this vital field, as well as in training students to participate as activists and scholars in the human rights movement."

Since the Program’s creation in 1984, the Law School has offered more than 60 courses on human rights issues. It has brought in visiting professors from five continents and many different cultures.

The scholarly and activist sides of the Program are often closely integrated in the work of students. Each year the Program supports students who go abroad to work on summer human rights internships in a range of countries. The Program also welcomes visiting fellows from developing countries to do work at Harvard and return better-equipped to pursue their careers.

Steiner described the upcoming anniversary event as "a celebration of the Program and what its alumni are doing," and predicted that there will be a large turnout.

The keynote speaker Saturday night will be Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor Emeritus, Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, and the 1998 Nobel Laureate in economics. Sen will speak on the topic, "Are Human Rights ‘Nonsense on Stilts’?"

Christopher Lydon of The Connection, a National Public Radio program, will host a conversation Saturday morning among six human rights experts on the theme, "A Half-Century of International Human Rights: What’s Changed?"

More than half the panelists at the celebration are alumni of HRP. Among them are Navi Pillay, president of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; Jessica Neuwirth, founder of Equality Now; and George Edwards of Indiana University Law School at Indianapolis and Makau Mutua of the State University of New York at Buffalo, both of whom have become directors of human rights programs at their universities.

The panels on Saturday and on Sunday morning explore diverse themes: globalization and human rights; challenges to the universalism of human rights norms with respect to issues like gender; criticism of U.S. practice and policy from human rights perspectives; responses to massive violations through international prosecutions and truth commissions; and the role of the university in the human rights movement.

The celebration carries a sad reminder that the struggle for human rights entails very real dangers. Neelan Tiruchelvam, a Harvard Law graduate who worked closely with HRP and who was to have participated in the discussions, was recently murdered by a suicide bomber in his native Sri Lanka.

There will be a memorial service for Tiruchelvam on Friday and a moment of silence at the start of the Lydon panel on Saturday morning to honor this remarkable and courageous man who risked his life for peace and justice.

All talks and panel discussions are free and open to the public. Full information appears at the Program’s Website, http://www.law.harvard.edu/Programs/HRP/anniv.html and in the lobby of Pound Hall at the Law School all day Saturday.