This is a regularly updated selection of pieces discussing emerging scholarship and current events related to international human rights. We encourage commentary submissions from within the UT community and from outside students, academics, practitioners, and policymakers. Submissions should be no longer than 750 words, and will be reviewed by an editorial committee member before being posted. Please send submissions, and any questions, to RCWPS@law.utexas.edu.
1 February 1982, Commission on Human Rights addressing the problems of genocide, political liquidations, mass killings, arbitrary and summary executions, disappearances, torture, etc.
Photo Credit: United Nations
Summer 2024 Barbara Harlow Intern, Charles Ozuna, analyzes legal justifications for torture in the United States, drawing on personal stories to illustrate Barbara Harlow’s argument about the psychological and physical toll of torture techniques.
From the River to the Sea is a 2021 painting by Sliman Mansour [Courtesy of Sliman Mansour]
Spring 2024 Barbara Harlow intern Raiyan Shaik explores the importance of cultural resistance in Palestine, drawing on insights from Barbara Harlow's concept of Resistance Literature (Harlow, 1987), as well as the broader context of colonial modernity and its impact on Palestinian liberation.
Fall 2023 Barbara Harlow intern Manasi Chande analyzes the manufactured legal system for Guantanamo Bay detainees, evaluating how the U.S. Supreme Court’s justification for the separate, unequal legal system has created a “law-free zone” that perpetuates a cycle of human rights abuses against detainees.
Spring 2023 Barbara Harlow intern Ikram Mohamed traces the rise of mass incarceration of immigrants in the United States post-9/11, citing the harsh enforcement practices and human rights abuses that occur under the "immigrant-industrial complex" as directly connected to the country's legacy of slavery.
Mural honoring Marielle Franco in the Jardim Paulista/Pinheiros neighborhood of São Paulo. (Photo credit: Edward Shore)
Xavier Durham, Barbara Harlow Intern in Spring 2018, reflects on the assassination of human rights activist and Rio de Janeiro Councilor Marielle Franco through the lens of structural anti-black state violence in Brazil.
Rapoport Center intern Aaron Burroughs (2018) argues Lebanon must ensure employment opportunities for Syrian refugees of working age and fair access to resources and services, easing the coercive economic conditions that necessitate child labor within refugee households.
Labor and Human Rights Fellow Lissette Almanza reflects on her summer at the Solidarity Center in Washington DC.
Ricardo Velasco (2018) Local "Sabedores" meet regularly in Isla Grande, Islas del Rosario, to discuss strategies to pass on to younger generations their traditional cultural knowledge.
Ricardo Velasco reflects on his work as a Berta Cáceres Fellow, undertaking fieldwork with the Sustainable Settlements for Peace, a program developed by the organization CASA (Council for Sustainable Settlements of Latin America) and the Foundation Mentes en Transicion in Isla Grande, Islas del Rosario and in Filandia, Department of Quindío, Colombia.
Leah Rodriguez's article, "The Production of Precarity: How US Immigration ‘Status’ Affects Work in Central Texas" offers a comprehensive breakdown of the relationship between immigration law and precarity for immigrants in the United States. In response, Elizabeth Schmelzel considers why the public provision of immigration attorneys is a necessary corollary to Rodriquez's proposed solutions.
In our daily lives we are regularly giving away bits and pieces of our privacy. When we use Fitbit, the company is given access to where and when you have been somewhere. (Flickr, Charlene McBride)
To be a part of the modern world one must be connected to it constantly. The pervasiveness of technology, combined with its necessity in the modern world, has made issue of use of personal data for convenience versus protection of personal data for security an all-important debate.
One of the main criticisms is that the new Penal Code, like the 1976 Penal Code, only defines punishments that fall under the Tazir, which are punishments that are not defined in the Quran or Sunna and are executed under the discretionary power of the judge, in article 2(1). (credit: Todd Huffman, Flickr)
In May 2017, Afghanistan enacted a new Penal Code in an attempt to modernize and unify the statutes regulating crimes and their punishments. Murtaza Rahimi discusses some of its primary criticisms.
Anna Banchik considers the human rights implications of online content regulation, finding that such moves could jeopardize the work of human rights groups who rely on social media sites to find and corroborate possible evidence of rights abuses.
Last July, the court found Lula guilty of receiving a beachside apartment from a construction company in exchange for lucrative contracts in state projects.
Following the decision of Porto Alegre’s appeals court to uphold the corruption conviction of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva three weeks ago (1/24/2018), Eyal Weinberg explores its impact on Brazil.
Some multilateral trade agreements have successfully encouraged the development labor standards with targeted economic sanctions. However, using labor standards as a solution to poor working conditions overlooks the cost of isolating developing economies while they remain non-compliant.
Julie Wilson explores the incorporation of labor standards into multilateral agreements. She discusses how trade sanctions could induce compliance for labor violations, and argues that labor standards remain a limited tool to improve workers’ conditions globally.
Youth set up a mobile food stand near the Mercado de Minero, or Miner's Market, in San Luís Potosí. (Scott Squires, July 2014)
Sofia Bonilla presents the case of dangerous mining in Bolivia as part of the larger global issue of child labor. She calls for governmental reform that goes beyond conditional cash transfers and enacts actual solutions to combat the deadly child labor conditions in Bolivia.
Sierra Leone has virtually no laws to regulate in-country or out-country outsourcing. As a result, employees are losing their jobs to contract workers. (Image: David Hond)
Kaifala details the exploitative effects of in-country outsourcing in Sierra Leone and pushes for domestic standards that protect workers' human rights.
Are unpaid internships really an option for all candidates? Or do they favor the financially capable and take away opportunities from disadvantaged applicants?
Patrick Aana discusses the exclusionary effect of unpaid internships on applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, particularly at the United Nations. He argues for a change in internship policy that focuses on how to compensate interns that eliminates class barriers and promotes equality.
Focusing on enhanced transparency does little to rectify extant business-related human rights abuses in Burma (Photo by Waldemer Merger shared under a CC BY 2.0 license)
In light of rapidly increasing levels of investment in Burma, Kate Taylor considers the ways in which transparency is being used as a governance tool to pursue corporate accountability for human rights abuses. She argues that transparency is a laudable beginning for investments in Burma, but it is the start, and not nearly the end, of the broader accountability project.
Feminist scholarship offers the tools to build a more just and inclusive internet.
In the age of Big Data—when Silicon Valley “tech bros” are busy convincing us of the merits of machine learning, and the US president pretends to govern while flirting with his white supremacists followers on Twitter—Inga Helgudóttir Ingulfsen makes the case for why we need critical feminist scholarship now more than ever.
Shanzhai culture treats reproduced clothing and other goods as art -
which clashes with government restrictions on counterfeit work.
Sara Liao’s article, “Fashioning China,” weaves together the human element and the true impact on women’s livelihoods to explore the legal discussion surrounding governmental restrictions on counterfeiting.
Mehta traces violence following migrant women across the India-Bangladesh border. This violence operates as a method of control over movement between unequal regions.
Rimple Mehta’s ethnographic exploration of the violence of mobility is a critical intervention in studies of migration across the India-Bangladesh border and of border crossing more generally.
Today, people of color make up thirty-seven percent of the United States population but sixty-seven percent of the prison population.
The prison system in the United States equates to modern-day slavery due to its targeting of racial and ethnic minorities. There are 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails, which amounts to a 500% increase over the last 40 years. One in seventeen black men, aged between thirty and thirty-four, were in prison in 2015, as were one in forty-two Hispanic males, and one in ninety-one white males in the same age group...
The wave of arrests targeting journalists and activists in Lebanon over online statements— especially those made on Twitter and Facebook—during the last few years has escalated at an alarming rate.
An enraged young Lebanese activist, Ahmad Amhaz, was detained in March over this Facebook status: “Three kinds of animals currently rule our country: a donkey, a crocodile and a third whose kind is yet to be discovered.” Referencing the Lebanese president, prime minister...
How do we balance our need to prevent attacks by foreign agents and our right to privacy?
Considering the most recent release of information by WikiLeaks, and the ongoing 2016 election investigation, it seems as apt a time as ever to reevaluate the right of privacy and how far it truly protects the individual. In the United States, while the right to privacy...
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which sits in San Jose, Costa Rica, hears cases on human rights violations in the Americas.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been subject to significant criticism regarding the absence of participatory mechanisms that allow societal actors to intervene in the inter-American process. To some extent, these critiques reflect a similar demand that is occurring in the domestic realm...
Presently, cases of outright denial to enroll Romani children to academic institutions continue to remain prominent. The mayors of several French municipalities refused to enroll Roma children in public schools on the basis of lack of certification. Certification, however, is not easily achieved by Roma parents as informal settlements are almost never recognized by government officials.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination released a statement in 2000 that acknowledged “the place of the Roma communities [is] among those most disadvantaged and most subject to discrimination in the contemporary world.” Such socially and institutionally accepted xenophobia...
Protestors push back against the idea that refugees are not welcome.
“#RefugeesNotWelcome: Making Gendered Sense of Transnational Asylum Politics on Twitter” by Inga Ingulfsen is the winning paper of the 2016 Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights, an interdisciplinary writing competition organized by the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.
Before the broadcast, the five directors nominated in the best foreign language film category released a joint statement, where they denounced "the climate of fanaticism and nationalism we see today in the US and some many other countries." (Express Tribune)
On a night usually reserved for celebrating Hollywood elites, human rights violations around the world were featured front and center in several winner’s acceptance speeches. Especially in the categories that celebrated international achievement in filmmaking, winners did not hesitate to make strong statements in support of inclusion, tolerance, and peace...
Not all training programs, according to Swidler, were equally effective in preventing and treating HIV/AIDS. This and other shortcomings in the NGOs efforts, Swidler found, arose when the priorities of foreign volunteers were disconnected from local needs. Many volunteers had an idealized fantasy of helping the Other, which Swidler called the “romance of AIDS altruism.”
How is culture embedded within institutions? This central question drives the research of Ann Swidler, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. The interplay between culture and institutions has taken her from investigating how middle-class Americans talk about love to studying the international AIDS effort in sub-Saharan Africa...
Recently, scholars are returning to scrutinize the interplay between business corporations and Latin American regimes. Early literature has already unraveled the close ties between business elites and authoritarian rules, from the state’s reliance on industrialists in developing a pro-market, open economy, to industrialists’ consent and sometimes-active support of coups d’état and ensuing state-led repression.
State terror and human rights violations during Latin America’s authoritarian phase have been amply studied in the past two decades. Scholarship has revealed how Cold War military dictatorships and juntas-headed national security states detained, tortured, and disappeared hundreds of thousands of civilians— from indigenous groups in Central America to political activists...
Israeli Arab Talleen Abu Hanna, 21, poses on stage after she was announced as the first Miss Trans Israel. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)
On May 27, 2016, Talleen Abu Hanna, 21, became the first Miss Trans Israel. On an international scale, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals face discrimination not only by those in their communities, but also by...
Awlaki, a U.S.-born and U.S.-educated radical Muslim preacher, had been the target of a protracted mission to eliminate him, in an operation code-named “Objective Troy.” (New York Times)
Mark Danner’s portrayal of the muted denunciation of human rights abuses during the now more than decade-long U.S.-led global “War on Terror” and the remission of the once honorable paradigm of the exposure of injustice leading to redress were especially poignant reminders of the current crisis in humanitarian thought and activism...
The Obama administration has made extensive use of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Somalia, killing between 3,500 and 5,000 individuals. (CNN)
Danner offered an incisive analysis of the current state of the United States’ War on Terror, an analysis that should not only sound alarm bells among European leaders as they choose military strikes as their response to the latest attack by ISIS in Paris, but also raises difficult questions about the part a human rights framework could play in putting an end to torture, indefinite detention...
Not only have human rights policies failed to alleviate economic inequality in the Mercosur region, but they have also, in some instances, perpetuated those very inequalities. (Vice)
Focusing policies on tertiary-level education, Lauchner argues, rather than on primary and secondary education, has disproportionately benefited elites and perpetuated existing inequalities in society...
Nike’s track record on worker’s rights raises the question as to whether the Girl Effect is a “brand-led movement” or a movement to re-brand Nike. (Fastcompany.com)
In 2009, Nike launched the Girl Effect, a “brand-led movement” targeting the alleviation of poverty among girls worldwide. The initiative advocates for investing in adolescent girls to create future workers and stimulate economic growth...
The kafala system—with all its legal underpinnings—is used to govern any worker within the country who is not a Gulf Cooperation Counsel national.(Al Jazeera)
The kafala is a system of laws and customs used to govern migrant workers in these countries. Some of the more egregious laws tie workers to one employer, enabling the confiscation of the workers’ passports during their stay in the country...
