October 21, 2008
New Human Rights Council hosts week of events
Julie Mertus, a professor in the School of International Service (SIS), always wanted AU with its “great reputation as a place to study human rights” to have an umbrella organization for faculty and students interested in the discipline.
According to Mertus, AU students “need information to make academic and career decisions,” and the faculty need “the synergy and support of colleagues.”
This fall—with the support of SIS dean Louis Goodman and the Office of the Provost —Mertus formed the AU Human Rights Council, a campuswide initiative created to widely share information about human rights courses, speakers, and publishing opportunities.
Their Web page, www.american.edu/humanrights, is a one-stop-shop for students, faculty, and staff interested in human rights research and advocacy. Visitors can learn about AU’s 32 human rights student groups, apply for internships or fellowships, and peruse human rights publications. People can also apply for small grants, ranging from $100 to $1,200, that can be used for an honorarium, or to purchase food and materials for a human rights event.
To call attention to Human Rights Week, Oct. 14–17, the council hosted four lunchtime events with scholars and practitioners, and is cosponsor of the ninth annual Human Rights Film Series, which will run through Nov. 13, with screenings scheduled every Wednesday and Thursday.
Highlights from Human Rights Week at AU:
• Students share highlights of international human rights fieldwork
Students discussed their human rights research and activism, which has taken them around the globe, from the Brazilian Amazon to Tanzania.
—SIS graduate student Paul Colombini traveled to Delhi, India, last summer to work with wastepickers, the people who sell trash to be recycled. It’s dangerous, unsanitary work that pays little more than $2 or $3 a day.
Through Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, Colombini launched a Facebook group devoted to the workers’ plight, a blog, and a YouTube site that features interviews with the wastepickers. “I wanted to give them a voice,” he said, “to give people a glimpse into their daily lives. They are the poorest of the poor,” he said.
—To research her doctoral dissertation, Barbra Lukunka, anthropology, CAS, traveled to refugee camps in western Tanzania. She found herself drawn into the stories of women there, but as a researcher felt really powerless.“Then I realized [their] talking to me was almost therapeutic for some women. You could see it in their faces: ‘Someone’s listening, someone cares.’”
• Human rights advocates take two steps forward, one back
Addressing a standing-room-only crowd on Oct. 15, Joanna Weschler and Ellen Dorsey shared lessons learned from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in December.
—Joanna Weschler, director of research at the Security Council Report, offered a brief history of the United Nations Security Council, which is charged with maintaining international peace and security. The 15-member body, the most powerful within the U.N., can “potentially have the greatest impact on human rights issues . . . though that potential is still largely unrealized,”Weschler said.
For decades, the Security Council considered human rights a matter of state sovereignty. It wasn’t until after the Cold War that council members began to acknowledge the inextricable link between human rights and global peace and security. In the last decade, the council has passed 15 to 23 resolutions annually, which touch on human rights in some capacity.
Still, Weschler said, there is much room for improvement.
“Things never happen in a straight line,” she explained. The promotion of human rights “has always been a convulsive process. We take two steps forward and one step back.”
—Ellen Dorsey, director of the Wallace Global Fund and former chair of the Amnesty International board of directors, called the human rights revolution “a very incomplete one.”
She called upon students to take a holistic approach to human rights research and advocacy. “We need to reintegrate civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights—that’s your challenge for the next 60 years.”
