CISAC Co-director Siegfried Hecker has called on colleagues and friends to congratulate his co-director, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar on being named to an endowed professorship at Stanford Law School. Cuéllar is now the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, named for the late Stanford constitutional law professor. Hecker issued the following statement:

"A member of the Stanford faculty since 2001, Tino became my co-director at CISAC in September 2011. He is also a faculty affiliate of CDDRL and a senior fellow at FSI. The endowed professorship is a tribute to his extensive work in both the law and international security and cooperation. Tino has done much to take CISAC forward as a center that focuses not only on nuclear nonproliferation, arms control and counterterrorism, but one that also tackles cyber and biosecurity, as well as migration and transnational flows.

"His teaching and research focus on administrative law, executive power and how organizations implement critical regulatory, public safety, migration and international security responsibilities in a changing world.

"Tino has a new book coming out next month: “Governing Security: The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies” (Stanford University Press). The book explores the history and impact of the Roosevelt-era Federal Security Agency (today the Department of Health and Human Services) and the Department of Homeland Security established after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"Tino has served in the Obama and Clinton administrations, most recently as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy in 2009-2010. In July 2010, President Obama appointed Tino to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent agency charged with recommending improvements to federal regulatory programs.

"The Stanley Morrison professorship was established in 1996 by Joan and Henry Wheeler to honor Morrison, who was a beloved professor at Stanford Law School for three decades, specializing in criminal, constitutional, tax and international law."

It's the middle of the night when Maina Kiai receives an urgent plea from a human rights advocate in Russia. A recent draft law threatens to block civil society organizations from accessing foreign funding, cutting off their financial lifeline and exposing them to close monitoring by the state. Their work reporting on the government's moves to choke public dissent and suppress free speech is in jeopardy if this law is passed by the Russian legislature.

As the special rapporteur on the rights of peaceful assembly and association for the United Nations, Kiai's job is to collect first-hand information on human rights abuses and bring it to the attention of the international community.

Kiai is one of about 50 lawyers, experts and advocates around the world who volunteer their time as special rapporteurs for the U.N. Human Rights Council. With mounting case loads, a limited staff and shrinking budgets, special rapporteurs are left with little support to fight injustice and aid victims of some of the gravest human rights abuses.

In search of new tools to empower their work, the rapporteurs are now tapping the academic and innovative resources at Stanford to help them do their jobs better.

Harnessing the power of technology

Professor Jeremy Weinstein led the August workshop on new technologies and human rights monitoring. Photo credit: Sarina Beges

Recognizing that technology can increase productivity and efficiency, Stanford’s Jeremy M. Weinstein organized a workshop to bring technologists together with the rapporteurs and other experts to explore how new technologies can help them magnify their impact.

Weinstein, an associate professor of political science and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford, pushed for the use of new technologies as tools for promoting human rights and democracy when he served as the director of democracy and development on the National Security Staff of the White House.

“Special Rapporteurs occupy a unique position, with the legitimacy and mandate of the United Nations behind them as they track human rights abuses around the world," Weinstein said. "New technologies have the potential to amplify their voices, extend their reach, and ensure that citizens around the world have access to this valuable mechanism.”

Weinstein says the rapporteurs can use simple technologies such as database management systems and mobile phone applications to manage the volume of inquiries they receive, increase their response time to victims’ needs and build political support for their recommendations.

Juan Méndez, the rapporteur responsible for tracking torture and other abuses, receives upwards of 50 complaints a day from citizens and NGOs around the world. He wants a way to better organize, process and prioritize inquiries that would allow him to respond to victims in a more strategic, timely and systematic way.

"We have been self conscious of the need to apply new technologies and we are always looking for better ways of applying technology," Méndez said. "In my case, there is quite a learning curve to understand what the new technologies are and how they might work."

One of the most powerful tools for a special rapporteur is the country visit where they spend two to three weeks in a country of concern, visiting local nongovernmental organizations, meeting with government officials, holding press conferences and arranging visits with victims. Special rapporteurs must be invited by the host government to visit and countries with some of the most egregious human rights abuses on record - such as Iran and Zimbabwe - deny them access.

Due to the sensitivity of their findings, special rapporteurs are granted independence and impartiality in their jobs as they often have to say things that make governments uncomfortable. Sharing their findings is a challenge. Other than media coverage, the rapporteurs don’t have easy access to a large audience or the resources to disseminate their findings and recommendations widely in local languages.

But social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter could help heighten their profiles and improve communication with the public. During country missions, for instance, tweets and Facebook posts could easily advertise their visits to attract media and share their findings.

Tapping Stanford's technical edge

Since returning to Stanford where he is a resident faculty member at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Weinstein has been using the university's technical edge to benefit those working to advance democratic practices.

Technologists and human rights leaders gathered at Stanford’s d.school to innovate and create new technologies for U.N. special rapporteurs. Photo credit: Sarina Beges

Teaming up with the Brookings Institution and Google, CDDRL hosted an August workshop to bring together four special rapporteurs, civil society activists, technologists, and government donors to brainstorm how to best pair human rights monitors with the technology they need to be more effective in their work.

"What we’ve done is bring together a group of people who normally don’t talk to each other and got them to think about the subject from various users' points of view - the human rights victim, the civil society activist, the governments, and the special rapporteurs themselves,” said Ted Piccone, a senior fellow and deputy director for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and author of a new book, Catalysts for Change: How the UN’s Independent Experts Promote Human Rights . “But we also have experts from technology, from human rights organizers, from think tanks and research organizations, so the combination of smarts and ideas in that mix is fantastic."

The second day of the workshop was held at Stanford's d. school – the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design – where participants put the needs of the user at the center of the design process. Armed with an endless supply of markers, sticky notes and whiteboards, participants divided into groups to brainstorm how technology can assist the special rapporteurs with their mounting caseloads.

The ideas laboratory

Bringing the human rights and technology communities together underscored the gap that exists between the two worlds. Few of the special rapporteurs were using or familiar with technology tools ranging from social media, database management and encryption software.

While the digital divide may be large for some, it was evident from the technologists in the room that there are an abundance of innovative technologies to validate, manage and interpret data for special rapporteurs’ use.

"I would really love a streaming analysis, so public information out there is streamed to me live," said Kiai, the special rapporteur who focuses on assembly and association rights. "I would also like to have a website that can be accessed by activists around the world as a way to communicate and send updates to me."

Sanjana Hattotuwa demonstrates a mock-up of the Web-based dashboard designed for the special rapporteurs. Photo credit: Sarina Beges

One of the ideas presented by Sanjana Hattotuwa, a special advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation based in Geneva, is a mobile application that would allow anyone anywhere in the world to utilize audio, video, or text to submit a report of a human rights abuse.

"They could track it with a confirmation number, and it's a very easy way of submitting information to the special rapporteurs," said Hattotuwa. This could be a very promising innovation for victims to submit reports from the ease of a mobile device, and to bring them to the attention of the special rapporteurs in real time.

Hattotuwa said data obtained through this app could be fed into a Web-based dashboard system that would feature a world map highlighting where the reports are coming from, allowing the special rapporteur to process and visualize information. The dashboard would also feature a curated news feed.

While the special rapporteurs left the workshop more informed of these new tools and with some tangible ideas of how to enhance their work, many questions remained about the costs and training required for the users, as well as how to build political support for a future with more visible and accessible special rapporteurs.

"I think that there will always be institutional constraints - political constraints - things that we need to work through," said Méndez, the rapporteur who tracks torture cases. "But the four rapporteurs that are here these two days can actually carry the message of technology's use to the U.N. and try to resolve them."

Bringing the two worlds together for this workshop helped close the digital gap and introduce the potential that technology represents to the human rights community and beyond.

"What struck me most is how much there is out there, and how hard it is for us without context, to understand the tech world and how useful it can be," said Kiai. "So that of itself was a revelation."

The president, surrounded by his Cabinet members and senior national security and foreign policy advisors, appears grim as he declares: “This is certainly the greatest crisis I’ve ever faced as a president.”

He has ordered the deployment of U.S. forces into Syrian territory to protect civilians and establish safe zones. His Cabinet must now determine whether to order a pre-emptive strike against Syrian troops on word from the CIA that the Bashar al-Assad regime appears ready to use chemical and biological weapons stored in underground bunkers east of Damascus.

After a military briefing by the commander of CENTCOM, the president cautions those assembled at the classified briefing: “Remember, history will judge us, in part, by how thoroughly we discuss all the options today.”

With imagined top-secret memorandums from the CIA and the White House – as well as the real-deal Obama Nuclear Posture Review – some 20 Stanford undergraduate and law students dressed in suits and armed with laptops and position papers spend three hours debating the merits of an attack on Syrian forces.

Scott Sagan, a political science professor and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), plays Obama in the class co-taught by Allen Weiner, director of the Center on International Conflict and Negotiation at the Law School.

The Ethics and Law of War class presents law and political science students with some of the political, legal and moral consequences of war. For their final simulation, they must stay in character, grill one another as policymakers and world leaders might do behind closed doors – and then defend their final decisions.

“Instead of simply learning abstract just-war theory or international law doctrine, the simulations encourage students to apply what they've learned to real problems,” says Weiner, once a legal adviser at the State Department. “This provides for much deeper awareness of the subject matter and richer appreciation of the nuances and complexities.

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Scott Sagan as President Obama

Ethics & War

The class grew out of Stanford’s hugely successful, two-year War & Ethics lecture series, which concluded last month. Philosophers, writers, journalists, historians, social scientists, human rights activists and policy makers came together several times a month to grapple with the complex ethical equations of war. Co-sponsored by a dozen centers and departments across campus, the series drew big names and big crowds.

Vietnam War veterans and award winning authors Tobias Wolff – a Stanford English professor – and Tim O’Brien told a sold-out audience that writing about war was both therapeutic and heartbreaking. O’Brien was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “The Things They Carried,” a harrowing string of stories about a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam.

How do you write about war? “You do it sentence by sentence, line by line, character by character, even syllable by syllable,’ O’Brien told a mesmerized audience. “You dive into that wreck and try to salvage something.”

Journalist Sebastian Junger spoke at the screening of  “Restrepo,” his documentary about the Afghanistan War. Stanford students and faculty performed in George Packer’s play, “Betrayed,” which illuminated the U.S. abandonment of young Iraqi interpreters who risked their lives for Washington during the Iraq War. For the final event, Debra Satz, a philosophy professor and director of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Sagan, and Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force general who now leads the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University, debated the future ethical challenges of war.

Sagan, an expert in nuclear policy and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction who worked at the Pentagon and was a consultant to the Secretary of Defense, said the lecture series enriched his students by forcing them to pay attention and question the moral and legal underpinnings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I was stretched, intellectually, by this series,” he said. “It encouraged me to read and discuss both fiction and philosophy that raises the same ethical issues – from a very different perspective – that we analyze in political science.”

Back to class

Weiner, as stand-in for Vice President Joe Biden, tells those assembled they must consider that within 24 hours, 6,000 American troops will be in danger. The CIA has a “high degree of confidence” that Assad has ordered the removal of the chemical weapons from the underground bunkers and transport trucks have been spotted at the sights.

“As we head into an election cycle, the difficulties of the decision that we make today will be placed under even greater scrutiny,” Weiner says.

That decision will be to make one of these hard choices:

• The U.S. military withdraws its troops and avoids a military confrontation, but risks further civilian deaths and the condemnation of Arab Spring allies;
• Obama orders conventional airstrikes against Syrian troops, which could lead to thousands of inadvertent civilian casualties;
• Washington takes extraordinary measures and uses nuclear weapons to destroy the underground storage bunkers for its weapons of mass destruction. This last option likely would eliminate any chance of Syrian troops using chemical weapons, but it would open a Pandora’s box for the Nobel Peace Prize president who has pledged to work toward a nuclear-free world.

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U.S. Army Col. Viet Luong as CENTCOM Commander Gen. James Mattis

The students know Americans are weary of war after the WMD fiasco in Iraq and a decade-long war in Afghanistan, both of which have claimed countless lives and a trillion-plus in taxpayer dollars. Their decision – as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, among others – is weighted by the concern that Americans likely won’t re-elect a president who drags them into another costly warm, and by the fear that a successful president cannot let American troops be exposed to deadly chemical attacks.

The mock military briefing by Gen. James Mattis – played by visiting CISAC military fellow, U.S. Army Col. Viet Luong, himself a commander in Afghanistan – lays out the risks and probabilities of casualties under each scenario.

A student asks Luong which military option he would recommend.

The general prevaricates: “I’m a military guy; I tend to lean toward success and then I also consider civilian casualties. But I’m also very concerned about putting my soldiers at risk.”

Clinton, voiced by international policy student Micaela Hellman-Tincher, says she’s concerned about mission creep. “Consider the international implications of us entering into conflict,” she says.

The fake Samantha Power of the National Security Council, played by Ashley Rhoades, urges diplomatic measures and a stand-down from military conflict. “I’m not advocating in any way for inaction,” she says. “There are several diplomatic solutions. We ask that you give us 24 hours to be able to work on these diplomatic options and multilateral diplomacy.”

Such as what? Such as calling on Moscow to mediate or seeking a U.N. envoy.

The legal team from the law school lays out their arguments for why a preventive strike would be illegal under certain conventions; while a pre-emptive strike based on imminent and unavoidable threats of attack might be permissible.

Then Stanford law student Alex Weber – playing Avril Haines, legal advisor to the National Security Council – addresses the elephant in the room: the nuclear option.

“If you use a nuclear weapon, regardless of whether the Syrians use chemical weapons against our troops, you are, as Colin Powell said in the 1991 Gulf War, opening a Pandora’s Box, particularly because Syria has no nuclear weapon,” Weber says. “You are the nuclear nonproliferation president. There is a psychological button that you push that will prompt the media to take the ethical debate to new levels.”

In the end, consensus appears to be growing around an immediate preventive strike against the storage bunkers using conventional forces. The Cabinet knows this could lead to deaths on both sides, but allowing the Syrians to use chemical weapons could lead to even more.

“You can’t cut and run, Mr. President,” insists student Torry Castellano, playing White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew.

Obama says he will take their advice under advisement and all rise as he leaves the war room.

More photos of the student simulation are available at CISAC's Facebook page.