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Applications for summer fellowships open

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The Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), together with the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society are offering four summer fellowships in human rights for 2012. The application period has now opened to talented Stanford undergraduates interested in working for organizations, government agencies, NGOs or international organizations that promote or defend human rights. The deadline to apply is December 9, 2011.

“We hope that these fellowships will enable students to make valuable contributions to human rights theory and practice, while incorporating human rights work into their future careers,” said Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights at CDDRL. 

This is a very prestigious fellowship and rare opportunity for undergraduate freshman, sophomore, junior, and non-graduating seniors to gain practical experience at human rights-based organizations. Previous fellows have worked at Human Rights Watch in Washington, DC; UNICEF in Cairo; and Bethune House in Hong Kong.

Human rights fellows may undertake projects focusing on issues that include; freedom of speech; discrimination against women; the rights of children, elderly and minorities; and access to food, health, education and housing. To apply for the fellowship, the student applicant must contact and obtain the support of a sponsoring organization in either the U.S or abroad.  

Fellowships of up to $5,000 are awarded by a committee of faculty members, senior administrators and/or full-time professional staff at Stanford University based on the applicant's project proposal and budget For more information and to apply, please visit the website: http://ethicsinsociety.stanford.edu/grants-fellowships/human-rights/

Office hours for additional information will be posted on the website with:

Joan Berry, Assistant Director, Bowen H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society - jberry@stanford.edu

Helen Stacy, Director, Program on Human Rights - hstacy@stanford.edu

Nadejda Marques, Manager, Program on Human Rights - nmarques@stanford.edu

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Democracy and Human Rights Policy in the Obama Administration

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Co-sponsored by Stanford in Government (SIG)

 

Michael H. Posner was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor on September 23, 2009.

 

Prior to joining State Department, Mr. Posner was the Executive Director and then President of Human Rights First. As its Executive Director he helped the organization earn a reputation for leadership in the areas of refugee protection, advancing a rights-based approach to national security, challenging crimes against humanity, and combating discrimination. He has been a frequent public commentator on these and other issues, and has testified dozens of times before the U.S. Congress. In January 2006, Mr. Posner stepped down as Executive Director to become the President of Human Rights First, a position he held until his appointment as Assistant Secretary.

 

Mr. Posner played a key role in proposing and campaigning for the first U.S. law providing for political asylum, which became part of the Refugee Act of 1980. In 1998, he led the Human Rights First delegation to the Rome conference at which the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was adopted.

 

Mr. Posner also has been a prominent voice in support of fair, decent, and humane working conditions in factories throughout the global supply chain. As a member of the White House Apparel Industry Partnership Task Force, he helped found the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an organization that brings together corporations, local leaders, universities, and NGOs to promote corporate accountability for working conditions in the apparel industry. He also was involved in the development of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at promoting free expression and privacy rights on the internet.

 

Before joining Human Rights First, Mr. Posner was a lawyer with Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal in Chicago. He lectured at Yale Law School from 1981 to 1984, and again in 2009. He was a visiting lecturer at Columbia University Law School since 1984. A member of the California Bar and the Illinois Bar, he received his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall) in 1975, and a B.A. with distinction and honors in History from the University of Michigan in 1972.

 

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Schwab Residental Center
Vidalakis Room (Across from the Graduate School of Business)

Michael Posner Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Speaker
Conferences

Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America

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The Program on Human Rights and the Center for Latin American Studies are pleased to host the Conference "Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America".

Indigenous peoples around the world have often been dispossessed of their land, leading to ongoing conflict over control and usage of land and resources. Indigenous peoples in Latin America are no exception; they are among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable peoples in the region. Indigenous peoples in Latin America rank highest on underdevelopment indicators such as incarceration, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty and disease. They face discrimination in schools and are exploited in the workplace. Their sacred lands and artifacts are plundered from them. In many Latin American countries, indigenous peoples are not even permitted to study their own language.

The Stanford Spring conference “Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America,” brings scholars from all disciplines to examine the common trends, actors, challenges and changes among indigenous populations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Bechtel Conference Center

Alejandro Toledo President of Peru from 2001 to 2006 Keynote Speaker
Eliane Karp-Toledo Anthropologist, Economist and former First Lady of Peru (2001 to 2006) Keynote Speaker
Conferences
CDDRL Conferences
Indigenous Peoples Rights

The Future of India's Muslims

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India’s Muslims account for 13.4 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion population and constitute its largest minority group. Since the country’s independence in 1947 and right up to the present decade, the Muslim community in various parts of the country has suffered hundreds of violent, sectar­ian attacks. A recent peak involved the Gujarat riots of 2002, when 2,000 Muslims were killed in a state-sponsored pogrom. When the ruling party in Gujarat state, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was subse­quently re-elected to power in the province with a larger electoral margin than before, it raised fears that the discrimination and violence were acquiesced to by the major­ity Hindu community.

These fears dissipated in 2004 when the BJP lost power in national elections, ap­parently in part because of its sectarian policies. However, the loss of life and assets in the Gujarat riots has raised the question of how the weakened Muslim community could recover.  

In response, and in fulfillment of an elec­toral promise to Muslims, in 2005, the new national government in India, led by the Congress party, created a committee, termed the “Prime Ministers’ High-Level Committee on the Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Com­munity in India,” to study the status of the Muslim community to enable the state to identify areas of intervention. Informally known as the Sachar Committee, named after its Chairperson, Rajendra Sachar, the Committee submitted a report in 2006. 

Four years after the report has been writ­ten, far from acting on its findings, not a single area of intervention has been moot­ed by the state, even as the report remains largely ignored by the media and other or­gans of civil society. Why is this and what does it tell us about the future of India’s Muslims? 

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Avicenna: The Stanford Journal on Muslim Affairs
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Rafiq Dossani
Rafiq Dossani
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Peaceful protest as a means for overcoming discrimination

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Rafiq Dossani
Rafiq Dossani
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In a recent San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, Rafiq Dossani asks: "Why did many Muslim Indians watch [the January 25] events in Egypt unfold with a personal interest?" He suggests that despite a difference in the governments of Mubarak-era Egypt and democratic India, the peaceful protest carried out in Egypt could serve as a positive model for overcoming discrimination.
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Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : Human Rights : Rhetoric or Reality?

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Madeleine Rees qualified as a lawyer in 1990 and became a partner in a large law firm in the UK in 1994 specializing in discrimination law, particularly in the area of employment, and public and administrative law and she did work on behalf of both the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission mainly on developing strategies to establish rights under domestic law through the identification of test cases to be brought before the courts. Madeleine brought cases both to the European Court of Human Rights and The European Court in Luxembourg. She was cited as one of the leading lawyers in the field of discrimination in the Chambers directory of British lawyers. In 1998 she began working for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as the gender expert and Head of Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In that capacity she worked extensively on the rule of law, gender and post conflict, transitional justice and the protection of social and economic rights.

The Office in Bosnia was the first to take a case of rendition to Guantanamo before a court. The OHCHR office dealt extensively with the issue of trafficking and Madeleine was a member of the expert coordination group of the trafficking task force of the Stability Pact, thence the Alliance against Trafficking. From September 2006 to April 2010 she was the head of the Women`s rights and gender unit. For the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, focusing on using law to describe the different experiences of men and women, particularly post conflict. The aim was to better understand and interpret the concept of Security using human rights law as complementary to humanitarian law and how to make the human rights machinery more responsive and therefore more effective from a gender perspective.

Landau Economics Building,
ECON 140

Madeleine Rees Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia; Former head of the Women`s Rights and Gender Unit, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; Secretary General, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Speaker
Seminars

Koreans in Japan

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Although Koreans in Japan prior to World War II suffered racial discrimination and economic exploitation, the Japanese authorities nonetheless counted ethnic Koreans as Japanese nationals and sought to fully assimilate Koreans into Japanese society through Japanese education and the promotion of intermarriage.  Following the war, however, the Japanese government defined ethnic Koreans as foreigners, no longer recognizing them as Japanese nationals.  The use of the term Zainichi, or “residing in Japan” reflected the overall expectation that Koreans were living in Japan on a temporary basis and would soon return to Korea.

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Rennie Moon
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Secondary - Community College

Barbara van Schewick on the FCC's 'open internet' proceeding and implications for political speech

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Barbara van Schewick, Assistant Professor at the Stanford Law School, introduced the current debate about net neutrality and explored the implications for diversity and freedom of expression online.

Network providers were at one time ‘application blind' - they were unable to see what was contained in the data packets that allow information to be transmitted online. Now that this is no longer the case, a debate has emerged about the role for regulation in controlling the ability of network providers to block or interfere with applications. What was drawn up as a voluntary policy statement is now being considered and revised by the FCC's Open Internet Proceeding.

Blocking of applications is problematic on several counts. First, there may be incentives for network providers to block applications that threaten their own profitability (for example, Skype). This leads to a situation where the success of applications is no longer decided on user criteria and the overall value created for society diminishes. Second, the great promise of the internet is that it removes traditional gatekeepers (such as mass media outlets) to speech. This is undermined if network providers have the ability to control what content users see. This is particularly problematic since users cannot easily switch to another provider as they could if a particular store did not carry a product they wanted. The cost of switching makes this impractical and in places without a choice of providers, this is not an option.

In drawing up regulation against blocking the FCC is debating a number of related issues:

Discrimination: Even if blocking is prohibited, discriminating between levels of service can still allow network providers to slow down an application to the extent that it becomes un-useable. This is actually a more effective tool than blocking since it is much harder to detect. Users may attribute slow speeds to poor design and potentially useful applications will fail to get traction.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Charges for different levels of service: Even if we agree network providers should not discriminate between the services they provide in an arbitrary way, could they offer improved service for payment? Opponents argue that this policy would be bad for competition since new developers would be unable to pay for the levels of service that established players could afford. And it would threaten the ability of poorly resourced minority voices - e.g. small NGOs and publications - to get heard.

Exceptions to discrimination: Network providers argue that there needs to be some discrimination to allow them to undertake reasonable network management. But it is difficult to determine what counts as reasonable management. One concern is that peer to peer networks - which allow those without many resources to exchange material cheaply - might be targeted in particular, since they can create a lot of congestion. This might also threaten the ability of new applications with high bandwidths to get funding, since the risk of being slowed down by the networks would be perceived to be too high by investors.

Many of the major benefits of the internet - the ease of publishing and coordinating, for example - are only possible through applications. Hence the outcome of this debate will have serious implications for the future social and political impact of the internet. 

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