Tag: Human Rights

Mediation, Human Rights and the Rule of Law: The Challenges facing the UN’s Mediation Support Unit

A brown bag discussion with Mark Muller Stuart, Q.C.

 

Mark Muller Stuart QC currently works with the Mediation Support Unit of UNDP (United Nations Development Programme).  He is a senior advocate associated with Doughty Street Chambers in London and the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, where he specializes in public international law, criminal, terrorism and human rights related litigation. Muller regularly advises numerous international bodies on humanitarian and conflict resolution related issues.

 

Sponsored by the Human Rights Program. Co-sponsors: Harvard Law and Development Society [LIDS] and the Harvard National Security Law Association [NSLA].

Light lunch will be served.

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Rethinking Kiobel: Is there room for human rights in anticorruption enforcement?

April 21, 2014 – Maryum Jordan

This post was originally published in the Global Anticorruption Blog, an exciting new initiative by Harvard Law School professor, and LIDS mentor, Matthew Stephenson. Six current and former LIDS members–Rajarshi Banerjee, Daniel Holman, Maryum Jordan, Meng Lu, Philip Underwood, and Colette van der Ven–are contributors to the Blog. LIDS Live will post brief introductions to their posts, and direct you to the Blog to read the rest.

It is the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. In its decision, the Court narrowed the admissibility of Alien Tort Statute (ATS) claims related to extraterritorial human rights abuses, ruling that such claims are not actionable unless the claim has a sufficient nexus to U.S. territory. What kind of nexus is enough for an ATS case arising from exterritorial conduct? For cases involving foreign multinational companies, such as the defendant Royal Dutch Petroleum in Kiobel, a “mere corporate presence” in the U.S. is not enough.

A striking feature of this holding is the clear contrast between how a “mere corporate presence” in the U.S. is not enough for an ATS claim based on extraterritorial conduct, but is sufficient for a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prosecution. Although Royal Dutch Petroleum’s “mere corporate presence” in the U.S. was not a sufficient basis for an ATS claim, if these human rights abuses were tied to corruption for the retention or solicitation of business in Nigeria (and involved U.S. interstate commerce — a requirement not difficult for the DOJ and SEC to overcome), Royal Dutch Petroleum could be liable for FCPA violations. As a foreign multinational company, Royal Dutch Shell Company lists its shares on the New York Stock Exchange and prepares filings for the SEC. Such activity is sufficient for establishing FCPA jurisdiction.

This suggests a possible strategy for human rights advocates dismayed by the Kiobel decision: Perhaps it might be possible to more aggressively utilize FCPA enforcement for circumstances in which corporate accountability for human rights abuses is tied to bribery. Continue reading →

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Working on Human Rights at the Council of Europe

April 18, 2014 – Dean Rosenberg

Last summer, I interned with the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee of the Council of Europe, in Strasbourg, France.

The Council of Europe, which is distinct from the European Union, is composed of 47 member states, including the vast majority of European states (UK, France, Germany, Russia, Turkey etc.). The Parliamentary Assembly meets a number of times a year, and is composed of representatives from the national parliaments of each of the member states. The Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee is a Committee of the Parliament, and it deals with the proposal of resolutions that touch upon legal issues often relating to the administration of the European Court of Human Rights, which is within the organization’s purview. The staff of the committee’s primary role is to assist members with preparing resolutions to be proposed, as well as the accompanying research reports.

The internship was an amazing experience. I worked on three large projects. First, I helped create a report on the issue of the independence of the European Court of Human Rights. This involved researching the procedures for electing judges to the court, hiring and maintaining the court’s registry, and examining the post-retirement careers of the Court’s judges.

Second, I wrote a preliminary draft resolution and an accompanying report dealing with the accountability of international organizations for human rights violations. Currently, many of these organizations, such as the UN or NATO are largely unaccountable for any human rights violations they may commit. For example, the UN has asserted its immunity from suit after UN peacekeepers contributed to a cholera epidemic in Haiti that has killed close to 9,000 Haitians.

Finally, another intern and I created a report focusing on the challenges and opportunities presented by the possible accession of the European Union to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Perhaps the most unique component of my time at the Council was the parliamentary session itself. The building was buzzing with activity, and I, along with the other intern in the committee, had the opportunity to attend committee sessions during which the parliamentarians debated and voted on sending the resolution to the full session. These debates are often controversial and extremely heated, and it is definitely a thrill to be in the room when some of these issues are being discussed. One of the most interesting sessions involved a presentation by Amnesty International of Russia’s lawyers discussing their experiences of the treatment of lawyers and their clients in the Caucasus, delivered in a session attended by many Russian members of parliament from those areas. The session provided me with the chance to get first-hand experience of the political process and debates attached to what can sometimes be relatively abstract legal research.  The experience was sometimes heartening, but also disappointing and frustrating when resolutions were rejected for plainly political reasons. Indeed, while it is of course predictable that politics will play a role at any international organization, it was somewhat surprising the extent to which delaying tactics, obstructionist coalitions, and other political maneuvers can dominate the process of preventing any resolution, no matter how inconsequential, from being passed.

Working at the Council of Europe gave me a much better understanding of the way in which large international organizations, which play a crucial role in promoting human rights and development, actually work.

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Women at Work: A Post in Honor of International Women’s Day

March 7, 2014 – Sarah Weiner

One morning, while getting ready for work—at a leisurely, “island” pace that law school no longer affords—Vai Leka showed up on my doorstep wanting to go with me. My two-year-old neighbor was going through a stage of stealing her father’s shoes, and the photo I snapped of her, pencils in tow, ready for work, is one of my favorites from the two years I spent in Tonga as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Having researched women’s rights in developing countries during college, I arrived in Tonga keenly aware of its gender inequalities. However, as I settled in to my village, I of course realized that I knew little about the way men and women actually interacted in day-to-day life in the small archipelago. Women actively participated in town meetings, ran stores, and trekked into the capital for their coveted government jobs. Furthermore, my conversations with them revealed that the women in my village wanted the same thing as the men: a way to support their families and opportunities for their children to do the same.

One theme of Professor David Kennedy’s course at Harvard on Law and Economic Development is that development is about making hard choices—prioritizing certain policies based on your idea of what brings about development (and what development means) under the reality of limited resources. Reflecting back, this is exactly what I had to do. Not that it wouldn’t have been a worthy pursuit, but my time in the Peace Corps was not the time to be advocating for gender equality under the law. It was the time to be teaching children and youth—girls and boys—English, computer, and other skills that would help them compete for Tonga’s limited jobs.

Perhaps that is why a recent World Bank report, Gender at Work caught my eye. It calls for bold action to address the inequality that exists between men and women in the sphere of work. It focuses on making the economic case against exclusion, so the argument resonates both with people who see development as an increase in GDP and those who see development as improvements in human rights. Among its many findings is that in 128 countries, there is at least one law that contains a sex-based differentiation, “meaning women and men cannot function in the world of work in the same way.” There are five or more such differences in 54 countries.

At yesterday’s kick-off for the LIDS-WLA International Women’s Day exhibit at Harvard Law School, Inspiring Change, Inspiring Us, Dean Martha Minow suggested that perhaps by “changing the pictures on the wall, we can change biases.” Symbolism can be powerful. Changing the pictures on the wall matters, as does changing the laws on the books. Maybe Vai Leka, so eager to go off to work with me in her father’s shoes, will grow up to be Tonga’s first female Prime Minister. Or maybe she will be a teacher that inspires her students to change the course of Tonga’s history. And maybe she can become this woman in the current environment. But we owe it to girls like Vai to remove obstacles in their way so that all girls—in developed and developing countries alike—have a chance at joining the large group of women around the world that “inspire change and inspire us.”

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What is Development?: Reconciling Harvard Law School’s Rights-focused and Private Law-focused Groups

Jan. 20, 2014 – Raj Banerjee

This past year, every LIDS event has begun with the question: “What is development?” Even though we are the Law and International Development Society, we have no concrete vision of what development is. And we are wise in having none. At Harvard Law School, where we are based, those interested in international issues or development studies tend to fall into one of two categories: the human rights group, and the private international law/business group. The first group sees progress as the achievement of several individual rights: the right to food, education, clean water, freedom of speech, essential medicines. The second group focuses on economic growth, and the public and private infrastructure that stems from and feeds that growth.

One of our goals as an organization is to build a community at the intersection of law, policy and international development. And to build that community we need to reconcile the two categories listed above. Despite the significant overlap between these categories, students in one group rarely converse with those in the other. I remember attending a symposium on investor-state arbitration last year where a noted arbitrator was asked about how human rights law or environmental law factored into his decisions. His answer was simple: they did not. What I found surprising was that few of the dozens of students in the audience expressed surprise. These students belonged to the second group. They were going to embark on careers where they were bound to run into, or up against, students in the first group. And yet, even as students on the same campus, they rarely interacted.

LIDS is that rare space on campus where both groups interact. To check if that is true, we pose the question: “What is development?” The answers either focus on rights, or on economic growth. Sometimes, the people I or my colleagues pose this question to pause…they realize that whatever the answer is, it cannot solely be expressed in the language of either of the two groups on campus.

I am in India right now. A few months ago, local news outlets here fanned the flames of a debate between the U.S.-based Indian economists Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati. Both economists had come out with books about India this past summer. Mr. Sen’s An Uncertain Glory (co-authored with Jean Dreze) grimly noted that despite two decades of economic growth, India lagged behind even poorer countries on health and education indicators. In order to sustain growth, the Indian government would have to seriously invest in its primary education and healthcare infrastructure. Mr. Bhagwati’s Why Growth Matters (co-authored with his Columbia University colleague Arvind Panagariya) retorted, somewhat brashly, that GDP growth is what India should focus on. With growth, and with sound investment of the proceeds of growth, all else will follow.

India’s media played up the differences between the two arguments, and commentators put themselves in either the Sen camp or the Bhagwati camp. The whole thing reminded me of Harvard’s two international development groups. Thoughtful commentators eventually noted that, all nuance considered, there was little difference between Sen’s and Bhagwati’s theses. Both wanted economic growth, and both wanted a better-educated, healthier India. Likewise, at Harvard, both international development camps are deeply interested in the other’s area of focus. And LIDS allows both camps to acknowledge that interest.

Image: Bridge on the Sabie River, South Africa. By Chris Eason

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Attention 1Ls and 2Ls: Apply for summer fellowships through the Human Rights Program!

Attention Harvard 1Ls and 2Ls interested in doing human rights work this summer:  the application process for summer fellowships through the Human Rights Program is now underway!

Feel free to reach out the HRP fellowship student advisors with any questions:

Tess Borden (teborden@jd14.law.harvard.edu)

Sam Birnbaum (sbirnbaum@jd14.law.harvard.edu)

Sarah Wheaton (swheaton@jd14.law.harvard.edu) with any questions.

You can find their bios (and office hours) here.

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