The International Human Rights Exchange (IHRE) is the world’s only full-semester, multidisciplinary program in human rights for undergraduate students. The program is based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Joahnnesburg, South Africa and is a joint venture with Bard College. Applications for the upcoming Spring Semester are October 15th and are processed through the IHRE website.
Human Rights Watch calls on Ethiopia’s new leadership to release political prisoners, repeal restrictive laws, and reform legislation. The full article is available on HRW’s website.
Companies will be required to disclose if they rely on minerals from war-stricken parts of Africa under new rules adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Read the full article from The Hill’s “On the Money” blog.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke eloquently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. on July 30, 2012, at a release event for the 2011 International Religious Freedom Report. Secretary Clinton’s speech and the full report are available on Human Rights.gov, a State Department website.
Human Rights Watch declares that the government of Bangladesh should immediately cease its punitive restrictions on international organizations providing lifesaving humanitarian aid to the more than 200,000 Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh. Read the full article on Human Rights Watch’s website.
Gambian President Yahya Jammeh’s announcement that all death row prisoners will be executed next month has drawn condemnation from human rights groups and foreign governments. Read more onthe LA Times‘s World Now blog.
Mexican Supreme Court finds unconstitutional part of a military law that allowed soldiers accused of abusing civilians to be tried by military tribunals. Read more on the LA Times.
Examining Equity: A Multidimensional Framework for Assessing Equity in Payments for Ecosystem Services
Melanie McDermott, Associate Director of the Rutgers Initiative on Climate and Society at Rutgers University, will be speaking September 24th as part of the Monday Seminar Series from 12:00-1:30 in room 101, West Duke Building. This talk is part of the Environmental Justice Initiative in collaboration with Nicholas School of the Environment.
Melanie McDermott is a research assistant professor in the Human Ecology department and the associate director of the Rutgers Initiative on Climate and Society. With degrees in interdisciplinary social science (B.A., Harvard; Ph.D., Berkeley) and forestry (M.Sc. Oxford), she has over 20 years’ experience in the U.S., Asia, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean in research, policy analysis, and consulting. Her work has pursued a number of related themes: the social impacts of climate change mitigation and adaptation; the political ecology of natural resource management, with an emphasis on community forestry; indigenous land rights; gender; non-timber forest products and agroforestry; sprawl, green spaces, and urban forestry; and environmental risk communication. A focus on social equity crosscuts this diverse field. At a more theoretical level, she investigates how the causes and consequences of peoples’ resource-use practices are shaped by environmental factors and social relations of power, difference and identity operating across multiple scales.
The Institute welcomes students to campus with an open house from 3pm to 5pm on Friday, August 31st. Come join us for cupcakes and conversation as we gear up for the new year! The event will be held in Room 101 in the West Duke Building, across the hall from the main office of the Kenan Institute for Ethics.
Why do the world’s most revered companies end up embroiled in human rights abuses? What is to be done? How can the language and architecture of the human rights regime apply to companies, when it was created as a state-based system? How should all organizations in this domain–from companies with competing priorities, to resource-challenged NGOs, to the U.N. Working Group–best focus their limited time and capacity?” The U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Analysis and Implementation summarizes the current state of play in the field and contributes to the agenda going forward.