Columbia Human Rights News

Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh, a Columbia University faculty member detained in Iran since July 2009, has been transferred from prison to house arrest, according to a family representative.
 
Dr. Tajbakhsh was scheduled to assume duties as an associate professor of urban studies last fall at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.  He was arrested while working in Iran as a consultant, providing nonpolitical urban technical advice with explicit permission from the Iranian government.
 
Dr. Tajbakhsh was found guilty of “political crimes” by an Iranian court on Oct. 20, 2009.  He appealed his sentence only to then be accused of new espionage charges on Nov. 23.
 
Twenty Columbia faculty members sent a letter on Jan. 11, 2010, to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking her to work for Dr. Tajbakhsh’s release.
 
According to news reports, Dr. Tajbakhsh’s sentence was recently reduced from 15 years to five years.  He was transferred out of Iran’s Evin Prison and placed under house arrest, according to a Tajbakhsh family representative.

Dr. Alejandro Rivera (HRAP 2008) reports that he has been promoted to a position with the National Center for AIDS Prevention and Control with the Health Institute of Chiapas (Mexico). He has also been elected General Director of the Collective for Family Health (CIFAM), where he has been advocating for communities of people marginalized for their age, sex, gender identify, sexual orientation, or HIV/AIDS status since he co-founded the organization. Finally, he wrote that CIFAM was recently awarded a grant from the Human Rights Small Grant Scheme of the Australian Agency for International Development.

Nazibrola Janezashvili (HRAP 2009) has been accepted in the PhD Program at the Caucasus School of Law. She was also recently elected chairperson of Article 42 of the Constitution.

CSHR congratulates Professor Andrew Nathan, Chair of CSHR's Board, for his election to the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy.  Prof. Nathan was elected to a three-year term on January 15, 2010.

SIPA News interviewed 2009 Columbia University Human Rights Advocate and Co-Founder of Thai AIDS Treatment Action Group Karyn Kaplan.

Both text and audio versions of the interview are available.

SIPA News interviewed 2009 Columbia University Human Rights Advocate and >Co-Founder of Thai AIDS Treatment Action Group Karyn Kaplan.

Both text and audio versions of the interview are available.

2008 Advocate Peter Mulbah of Liberia hosted a Fellow from the Advocacy Project (AP) in the summer of 2009. A DC-based non-governmental organization, AP works with community-based advocacy around the club. Every year, AP recruits graduate students from North America and Europe to volunteer as Fellows with community-based organizations. Most serve for three months in the field where they provide valuable support for their hosts. The Fellows publicize the work of their hosts and advise them on developing information tools such as websites and newsletters. Many Fellows also continue to promote the work of their host after they return, through events at their university and outreach to local schools and civic associations. This builds cross-cultural bridges and a constituency of support for their host’s advocacy.

Watch a brief interview that the AP Fellow conducted with Peter

CIHRS' 2009 Annual Report on Human Rights in the Arab Region: "Bastion of Impunity, Mirage of Reform" is now online.  The full English version is at http://www.cihrs.org/Images/ArticleFiles/Original/485.pd

Twenty Columbia faculty members and officers signed a letter requesting that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton help secure the release of Kian Tajbakhsh from Iranian prison.  Dr. Tajbakhsh was found guilty of “political crimes” by an Iranian court on October 20, following his support of the Iranian uprising against the government in the aftermath of the disputed election last summer.  He appealed his sentence only to then be accused of new espionage charges on November 23, 2009.

Dr. Tajbakhsh, who earned a doctorate from Columbia in urban studies, was providing nonpolitical urban technical advice as a consultant with explicit permission from the Iranian government. He was scheduled to assume duties as an associate professor of urban studies last fall at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

More information about Dr. Tajbakhsh's situation is available at http://www.freekian09.org/. A copy of the letter to Secretary Clinton is available as a PDF.

Recent HRAP participant Mary Akrami of Afghanistan was interviewed recently by the editor of WeNews. Please see http://www.womensenews.org/story/the-world/091127/afghan-women-would-rather-talk-about-recovery

It's been eight years since the fall of the Taliban, but Afghan women continue to be among the worst off in the world. Afghan women's rights activist Mary Akrami and Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Rachel Reid explain how the United States and the world can live up to their commitments there.

Download the podcast or visit HRW's podcast webpage to subscribe.

BIND, a sustainable development organization located in the Philippines where HRAP alum Benedicto Sánchez serves as the project coordinator, was selected by KaSaMa consotium partners to be awarded for its human rights initiative. BIND's project proposal was selected for funding by KaSaMa in its 2009 Search for Philippine Innovative Human Rights Initiatives. BIND will be presented with the award on December 8th in Manila.

Read more about BIND at: http://www.bindnegros.org/about%20us.htm

Read more about KaSaMa at: http://www.kasama-ph.com/

HRAP Alum Aloys Habimana recently accepted the position of Deputy Director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch.  Aloys will spend six months in New York, after which he will be one of the first staff at HRW’s soon-to-open Nairobi office.  Aloys, who participated in the 2000 Human Rights Advocates Program at CSHR, also recently completed an MA and a JD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Overcoming Katrina was awarded the 2009 Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust Leadership in Journalism Award.  Read more about or purchase the book at http://us.macmillan.com/overcomingkatrina.

Reviews in the New Orleans Tribute and Black Press USA are online at http://www.neworleanstribune.com/bookreview.htm and http://www.blackpressusa.com/Op-Ed/Speaker.asp?NewsID=19859, respectively.

The Epoch Times covered CSHR's October 1 event, "Laogai: The Machinery of Repression in China."  Read the article at http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/23289/.