Submissions are now being accepted for ISHR’s 2013 Human Rights Essay Contest. The aim of the contest is to encourage and acknowledge undergraduate and graduate students who have written exceptional papers addressing human rights issues in their academic work. Cash prizes will be awarded to two graduate students and two undergraduate students currently enrolled at Columbia University. Prize winners and authors of other outstanding submissions will have the opportunity to participate in the Human Rights Student Colloquium. The deadline for submission is Monday, January 28, 2013. Applications are also currently being accepted for the Student Review Committee.

In “Are Children Today’s Iron Ore? Russia’s Adoption Ban and International Diplomacy,” Yasmine Ergas of ISHR discusses Russia’s recent action, suggesting that Putin and Russia’s Parliament “placed the child trade where it deserves to be: on the desks of foreign policy makers….”

On October 11, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and its International Criminal Court program, AMICC, hosted a senior attorney from the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor, Prosecutions Coordinator Alex Whiting. Whiting is responsible for managing and providing legal guidance and direction to all of the ICC’s prosecutions. At the event, he discussed the work of the Office of the Prosecutor and assessed its successes and shortcomings.

Whiting was previously a senior trial attorney at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. A former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts and a former trial attorney in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice, Whiting is on leave from Harvard Law School where he is an assistant clinical professor of law. He holds a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale.

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The Program on Peace-building and Rights hosted the Prime Minister of the Central Tibet Administration for a discussion on "Tibetan Democracy: a Model for China and the Region ". Moderated by David Phillips, Director of the Peacebuilding and Rights Program, the discussion provided the audience deeper insight into the current situation facing the people of Tibet.

In a high-spirited event, the Peace-building and Rights Program, along with members of the local Sudanese community and supporters welcomed ISHR Visiting Scholar Ahmed Hussain Adam to Columbia University. Mr. Adam will be working with the Program to develop and implement a Forum on the Two Sudans.

Peace-building and Rights Program Director, David L. Phillips, Program Coordinator, Danielle Goldberg and ISHR Director Elazar Barkan hosted Daw Aung Sung Suu Kyi at a luncheon during her visit to Columbia University. Her subsequent discussion with students, moderated by Ann Curry, was record setting with tickets for the venue in Low Library selling out in under an hour's time.

Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs honored Associate Director Yasmine Ergas with a "Top 5" teaching award for her International Law class in the Spring 2012 semester. Out of the approximately 200 courses taught each semester, the award is given to five professors that received the highest overall ratings in student evaluations.

ISHR is pleased to announce the launch of a new website for its program, the American Non-Governmental Organizations Coalition for the International Criminal Court (AMICC), which joined us in November 2011. The new site, still at www.amicc.org, is designed to better serve AMICC's constituents, as well as academics, practitioners  and the general public, by providing more current information on the work of the ICC and through better organization. It remains a repository of information on the US relationship with the ICC and is a leading resource on this topic. It is the only site dedicated solely to that relationship.

The new website would not have been possible without the valuable time and technical assistance of ISHR staff member Joe Kirchhof who coded the site from scratch and collaborated with the AMICC team to create the new design. It is in HTML5, the latest version of this programming language, and based on a lightweight, custom PHP framework. The new site includes all of the information from the previous AMICC site, launched in 2002, and is better equipped to incorporate multimedia and social media.

The new site is also much easier to update and change in response to new developments. We consider it to be an ongoing work in progress that will benefit from the input of our partners. We encourage you to take a look at the new site and share your feedback with us.

ISHR’s Program on Peace-building and Rights trained 27 lecturers from the University of Jaffna in Sri Lanka to launch its semester-long course on social harmony and conflict resolution (June 2012).  Lecturers will offer the course to the approximately 1,500 freshmen at Jaffna for the Fall 2012 semester. Plans are also underway with Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Higher Education to launch the curriculum at other universities throughout the country.

ISHR's report on its activities and programs for the year 2010-2011 is now available on-line. Read about the new major in Human Rights Studies at Columbia College, the development of ISHR's capacity-building programs, and new research programs in areas including Peace-Building and Human Rights and Historical Dialogue and Accountability.

US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Stephen J. Rapp spoke on “The Lubanga Verdict: Its Impact on the International Criminal Court and US Relations with the ICC.” Following the conviction of the ICC’s first defendant, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, for the war crime of enlisting and using child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the senior government officials dealing with international justice policy discussed the verdict and what it meant for the ICC and the evolving US relationship with the world’s first permanent international criminal tribunal. Ambassador Rapp, a former US Attorney and international prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, won the first convictions in history for recruitment and use of child soldiers. Presented by Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights and its program, the American NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court (AMICC).

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Danielle Goldberg, Program Coordinator for ISHR’s Peace-building and Rights Program, contributed to the development of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Peacebuilding Toolkit for Educators (a complete curriculum guide for middle school and high school classrooms). The curriculum is available for download on USIP’s new Global Peacebuilding Center website.

Introductory remarks by Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and Prof. Yasmine Ergas were followed by a screening of The Reckoning, a documentary film that explored the history of the establishment of the International Criminal Court. Film director Pamela Yates led a post-screening discussion.

ISHR bid farewell to its Human Rights Advocates, who returned to their home countries at the end of the semester. Pictured here (left to right) are advocates Hasina Khan and Salima Namusobya.

What rights do people have to claim against social and economic inequality? Is inequality unjust? Who can be held accountable? This debate engaged Occupy Wall Street protesters and Columbia faculty from the Economics, Business, Law, Human Rights and Political Science worlds. Panelists included Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs, Director of SIPA’s Human Rights Concentration, and Director of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights; Bruce Kogut, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Professor of Leadership and Ethics, Columbia Business School; Peter Rosenblum, Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein Clinical Professor of Human Rights Law, Columbia Law School; Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki‐Moon; Dorian T Warren, Assistant Professor of Political Science, SIPA; Yesenia Barragan, OWS Protester and Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University; Alicia White: OWS Protester and M.A. Candidate, Columbia University. Professor Anya Schiffrin moderated the discussion.