Fall 2019

The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law recently completed its first strategic plan, under the leadership of Executive Director Kate Mackintosh.

Drawing on the unique strengths and resources of UCLA and the creativity and dynamism of the city of Los Angeles, the institute aims to make major contribution to improving the situation of human rights for people at home and around the world. We will do this by empowering a new generation of human rights lawyers and leaders, generating new thinking on human rights, and engaging our students and our research to drive real-world positive impact.

For the next five years, our research and advocacy will focus on the following issues that are reshaping our world and that resonate deeply with our location in Los Angeles:

Technology and human rights
Migration and human rights
Human rights and the protection of the Environment
Race, Indigenous Peoples and human rights
Human rights Accountability

Here is a look at some exciting Promise Institute projects for 2019-20 – please visit our website for details!

Technology

Thought Leadership Series – Race, Human Rights and New Information Technologies. This workshop will bring practitioners and scholars together to highlight areas in need of conceptual development and hammer out reform and accountability proposals, in collaboration with the UCLA Center on Critical Internet Inquiry.
Interdisciplinary Human Rights Research Support – Kamari Clarke, UCLA Professor of Anthropology, will lead a project on Evidence and Social Justice in a Post-Truth World, exploring the ways that human rights documentation is inspiring the development of human rights technology applications.

Migration

Thought Leadership Series – The Migration and Human Rights Big Think. This convening will bring activists and academics together to radically reconceptualize how human rights can articulate and support the experience of contemporary migrants.
Student Support – Funds will subsidize student travel to the U.S.-Mexico border to provide Know Your Rights trainings to asylum seekers impacted by the U.S.’ Remain in Mexico policy.

Environment

Flagship Conference – Human Rights and the Climate Crisis. A day-long symposium will feature a keynote by Kumi Naidoo, Secretary-General of Amnesty International and former International Executive Director of Greenpeace, in collaboration with the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs.
Thought Leadership Series – International Criminal Law and the Protection of the Environment. This expert roundtable will bring academics and practitioners together to conceptualize strategies for using existing and emerging international criminal law to protect the environment.

Race and Indigenous Peoples

Thought Leadership Series – Reparations in Context. A series of events in collaboration with the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy will bring legal scholars, historians and activists into conversation to examine reparations in various contexts and develop a textured understanding of how the past can inform the future.
Interdisciplinary Human Rights Research Support – Combating Global Anti-Muslim Racism. Seed funding will go to faculty from Law, Gender Studies, Anthropology and other departments to launch work to develop a feminist analysis of the global context of anti-Muslim racism and violence and its links to other racisms and to explore anti-racism strategies and solidarities both within and outside Muslim communities.

Accountability

Experiential education – New program UCLA Law in The Hague will take UCLA Law students to The Hague, the Netherlands, for one semester to work at an international court while studying “International Courts in Practice”.
Distinguished Fellow in Residence – Richard Dicker, International Justice Project Director at Human Rights Watch, will spend the spring semester at the Promise Institute, writing and teaching on "Prospects for International Justice."

Alongside these new initiatives, the Promise Institute will continue to support expansive experiential learning opportunities for students through our existing International Human Rights Clinic, taught by Promise Institute Faculty Director E. Tendayi Achiume, and our Human Rights in Action: Collaborative Grassroots Lawyering Clinic, taught by Joe Berra. We will introduce innovation techniques to the law school community in a week-long intensive Human Rights Challenge taught by faculty from the Dutch THNK School of Creative Leadership. NYU School of Law Professor Joseph Weiler will teach a short course on “Hard Cases Make (Bad) Human Rights Law”, and we are hiring an additional clinical director to launch a new human rights clinic with a domestic focus in 2020.

Keep up with everything at the Promise Institute!