Blog: Fellowships
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October 13, 2020
Godfrey Odongo Joins HRP As Visiting Fellow
The Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School is pleased to welcome Godfrey Odongo, Senior Program Officer with the Human Rights Program at the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, a US-based private foundation, to join HRP as a Visiting Fellow this fall. With Harvard Law School continuing to operate remotely this year, Odongo will engage with the human rights community at Harvard Law School virtually. He will use his time as a visiting fellow to research the new frontiers of human rights advocacy and activism in the age of populism, the covid-19 pandemic and contemporary challenges to the legitimacy and effectiveness of human rights.
In his current role, Odongo manages funding portfolios for an ecosystem of key civil society and institutions advancing human rights norms in multiple contexts. He has previously served as a regional research expert on East Africa with Amnesty International; in a program advisory role with Save the Children-Sweden; and as a research fellow with the Dullah Omar Institute for Constitutional Law, Governance and Human Rights at the University of the Western Cape and at the Danish Institute for Human Rights. An advocate of the High Court of Kenya, he holds a doctorate in international human rights law from the University of the Western Cape, a master’s in law in human rights from the University of Pretoria, and a bachelor’s law degree from Moi University.
Odongo spoke with HRP about his work and what he hopes to achieve this semester as a Visiting Fellow.
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September 24, 2020
Sabrina Mahtani on Gender & Prison Alternatives
The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime and the Thailand Institute of Justice recently released a Toolkit on Gender-Responsive Non-Custodial Measures, a handbook with information and guidance on alternatives to incarceration. Part of a Criminal Justice Handbook Series, the toolkit approaches incarceration as a last resort, providing support and guidance to make sure that women are not detained or imprisoned unnecessarily. “Now more than ever, with the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, there is a need to look towards non-custodial measures for women offenders to reduce the burden on the criminal justice system, maintain the health and safety of those in prison and ensure effective rehabilitation,” says the press release on the Thailand Institute of Justice’s website.
Human rights lawyer Sabrina Mahtani led the drafting and research, which took place in large part at Harvard Law School while she was a joint Fellow-in-Residence in the Human Rights Program and the Office of Public Interest Advising. You can learn more about Sabrina at the end of this post.
Sabrina recently spoke with HRP about developing the toolkit and where she hopes it will make the most impact.
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June 24, 2020
HRP Awards 2020-2021 Post-Graduate Fellowships
The Human Rights Program (HRP) is pleased to present its 2020-2021 Post-Graduate Fellowship cohort. This year, we have awarded Satter and Henigson Fellowships to six remarkable 2020 Harvard Law School (HLS) graduates: Fabiola Alvelais JD’20, Pavani Nagaraja Bhat LLM’20, Niku Jafarnia JD/MPP’20, Ji Yoon Kang JD’20, Delphine Rodrik JD’20, and Rupali Samuel LLM’20.
HRP’s post-graduate fellowships are designed to help launch the careers of students who have demonstrated great promise as advocates while at HLS. This year’s students are graduating into a world altered by the spread of the novel coronavirus. Many of them will begin their fellowships working remotely. As the pandemic exacerbates conditions for the most vulnerable, HRP is more committed than ever to supporting the careers of young professionals devoted to international human rights and social justice. Learn more about the new fellows and their projects below.
Continue Reading…May 24, 2020
At Harvard, Niku Jafarnia J.D. / M.P.P. ’20 found a wealth of ways to advocate for refugees
Posted by Dana Walters
“I have always felt very strongly that I need to work against inequality and the forces that make it possible,” says Niku Jafarnia J.D./M.P.P. ’20. For her, draconian and difficult immigration systems that favor certain populations are key sources of the disparities she hopes to eliminate.
When President Donald Trump instituted the first of many travel bans that targeted Muslim-majority countries in 2017, Jafarnia was a first-year law student and she was furious. She had not yet entered the legal clinics that would become like a home to her at Harvard Law School. Still, she emailed Sabrineh Ardalan ’02 and Phil Torrey of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic, asking how she could fight back.
“Had I not been in law school when this happened, I would have felt at a loss with what to do,” she says.
At the airport, she stood with Ardalan and Torrey holding a sign offering legal assistance and translation services in Persian. No one took her up on the offer, but the moment stands out to her from the last four years of graduate school. From the energetic and welcoming response of HLS’s clinical faculty to finding a way to act, she had found a community and a path towards countering what she sees as oppression.
Jafarnia believes that she has been lucky. A constellation of factors, such as being born in the U.S., has provided her with a great amount of opportunity, she said. She is constantly tuned in to how she can use her privilege to dismantle the inequitable structures that cause harm to others. When her parents emigrated from Iran in 1977 to pursue graduate education, they did not necessarily expect to stay, she said, but the combination of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War kept them in the U.S. Throughout law school, she has focused on issues related to migration, driven by a deep connection to people whose stories feel so familiar.
Continue Reading…May 22, 2020
HRP’s Summer 2020 Fellows Will Intern Remotely at Human Rights Orgs
HRP is pleased to announce its 2020 summer fellowship cohort: Sondra Anton JD’22, Anoush Baghdassarian JD’22, Zarko Perovic JD’22, and Mohammad Zia JD’21. Each year, HRP awards students funding to undertake summer internships at human rights organizations around the world. Due to the spread of the novel coronavirus, this year’s fellows will be working remotely for their organizations. Learn more about this year’s cohort below.
March 3, 2020
Apply to Be a Joint Wasserstein-Human Rights Program Fellow for Fall 2020
The Human Rights Program and Office of Public Interest Advising (OPIA) at Harvard Law School will jointly host one Wasserstein Fellow-in-Residence who will spend four months on the HLS campus (September through December 2020), and split their time between OPIA and HRP. At OPIA, the fellow will advise students about international public interest and human rights careers and assist OPIA staff in developing advising resources. At HRP, the fellow will devote the majority of their time to research and writing on a specific human rights topic and be a member of its community of visiting fellows.
The Human Rights Program’s Visiting Fellows Program seeks to give thoughtful individuals with a demonstrated commitment to human rights an opportunity to step back and conduct a serious inquiry in the human rights field. The fellows form an essential part of the human rights community at Harvard Law School and participate actively in the Human Rights Program Fellows Colloquium—each fellow makes a presentation to Human Rights Program staff, faculty, and other fellows on at least one occasion. Fellows are also encouraged to participate in a number of other Human Rights Program activities.
Please see OPIA’s website for additional information about the program, and details on how to apply to be a joint Wasserstein Fellow-in-Residence with OPIA and the Human Rights Program. The deadline to apply is April 10, 2020.
February 19, 2020
Visiting Fellow Anton Burkov Wins Case Before European Court of Human Rights
On February 5, 2020, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) delivered its judgment in Kruglov, et al. v Russia (no. 11264/04 and 15 other applications), and ruled that the searches of lawyers’ apartments and offices in connection with criminal cases against their clients was illegal. Human Rights Program Visiting Program Fellow Anton Burkov represented one of the applicants in the case, attorney Alexey Silivanov.
The judgment concerned searches carried out between 2003 and 2016, all but two of which were based on court warrants. In some of the searches, the investigating authorities seized items such as computers, hard drives, or documents. While the European Convention on Human Rights does not guarantee lawyer-client privilege as such, Article 8 of the Convention guarantees the right to respect for private and family life, the home and correspondence. The Court found that the searches of the lawyers’ homes and offices and the seizure of electronic devices containing personal information lacked sufficient justification, and that there were no safeguards to protect attorney-client confidentiality. As a result, the Court found violations of Article 8. The judgment has important implications for victims of similar searches in Russia.
For details please refer to the full judgment in English and in Russian.
Dr. Anton Burkov is the founder of ECHR-Navigator, an online teaching platform on strategic application to the ECHR which you can learn more about on Facebook. He is a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard Law School and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Human Rights Practice Program of the University of Arizona.
January 31, 2020
2019 HRP Summer Fellow Reflection: Emily Ray JD’21
Ray spent summer 2019 at the Forest Peoples Programme in Guyana
Summer fellowships for human rights internships are a central part of the Harvard Law School human rights experience. During the summer of 2019, HRP funded five HLS students to intern abroad at nongovernmental organizations for 8-12 weeks. At the conclusion of their internships, students returned to HRP with a deeper appreciation for the type of work required of human rights practitioners. While our 2020 summer fellowship application is open this month, we’ll be excerpting portions from their fellowship reports to provide a glimpse into the kinds of experiences open to human rights students at Harvard Law.
When Emily Ray JD’21 departed for the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) in June 2019, she was lucky to be joining International Human Rights Clinic alum, Lan Mei JD’17. Mei had been with the FPP for two years, first as a Henigson Fellow in Human Rights and then as a full-time staff attorney. As the only permanent staff member living in Guyana, Lan directly supervised Emily over the course of her internship.
FPP is a human rights organization committed to working with indigenous communities across the globe to secure their rights to their lands and their livelihood. They employ a partnership model and collaborate intensively with local organizations on their mission. At FPP in Guyana, Emily spent the bulk of her time working with the Wapichan people in partnership with the Amerindian People’s Association (APA). The Wapichan have a collective organization, the South Rupununi District Council (SRDC), through which villages can discuss shared issues and make decisions on governance and unified goals.
Over the summer, Emily focused on producing a training for members of the SRDC’s villages on mining in the Wapichan territory. As she describes it:
“The SRDC already had an established community program intended to monitor mining in the territory and record information for community awareness and potential use in later legal actions. However, the monitoring program needed to be revamped and updated in line with the community’s concerns and with Guyana’s mining laws. The 3-day training that we prepared and delivered served a number of functions; it allowed us to get a better sense of which mining issues the community cared most about and how to redesign the monitoring forms/program to address those issues; it also acted as a sort of know-your-rights training that educated community members about relevant Guyanese and international law. My personal role in this training consisted of preemptive research about applicable laws, working with Lan to plan and later adjust the training curriculum, generating handouts for participants to take home to their villages to disseminate information, leading several different elements of the training, and assisting in facilitating group work. After the 3-day primary workshop, we spent a fourth day working with the community monitors on fine-tuning the actual form that they complete on monitoring trips.”
Emily’s summer with the FPP was her first experience doing grassroots human rights work. She originally came to HRP’s summer fellowship program wanting to think more about the intersection between environmental conservation and indigenous rights. FPP’s small in-country base meant Emily was able to try her hand at a variety of projects, from drafting communications between villages and government officials to interpreting the language in the Guyanese constitution and mining regulations.
Emily described Lan as conscientious mentor. She learned a great deal from Lan through Lan modeling what an effective human rights advocate does. Emily noted she particularly admired Lan’s flexible demeanor and perceptive intellect.
“When we met with community stakeholders, Lan showed an acute ability to know exactly what was needed at any moment. If someone needed expert legal analysis on their rights, she would jump in. If we were at a community meeting and she noticed no one was taking notes, she would grab a pencil. She understood how doing international human rights work might require you to wear many ‘hats.’”
After working directly with clients on the ground, Emily saw first-hand how direct legal representation can be constrained by larger systemic forces. She hopes to gain a more holistic picture of the “entire human rights ecosystem” by studying policy in her 2L summer. During the fall semester, she worked on an International Human Rights Clinic team on women’s rights among refugees from Myanmar. She is also a dedicated member of HLS Advocates for Human Rights.
Interested in learning more about HRP Summer Fellowships? Schedule an advising appointment with Anna Crowe, Assistant Director of the International Human Rights Clinic, and apply to join our 2020 cohort today! Please note that you do not need to have a confirmed placement organization before you apply for the 2020 HRP summer fellowship pool. Applications are due TOMORROW, February 1, 2020!
January 27, 2020
2019 HRP Summer Fellow Reflection: Julian Morimoto JD’21
Morimoto spent summer 2019 in the Philippines documenting Duterte’s war on drugs
Summer fellowships for human rights internships are a central part of the Harvard Law School human rights experience. During the summer of 2019, HRP funded five HLS students to intern abroad at nongovernmental organizations for up to eight weeks. At the conclusion of their internships, students returned to HRP with a deeper appreciation for the type of field work required of human rights practitioners. Throughout January, we’ll be excerpting portions from the 2019 HRP Summer Fellowship cohorts’ final reports to provide a glimpse into the kinds of experiences open to human rights students at Harvard Law.
Last summer, Morimoto spent 12 weeks at Initiatives for Dialogue and Empowerment through Alternative Legal Services (IDEALS) in the Philippines, where he contributed to the organization’s analysis on the Philippines’ war on drugs and human rights law. In July, Amnesty International called President Rodrigo Duterte’s tactics over the last three years a “large-scale murdering enterprise” and called on the United Nations to investigate for “crimes against humanity.” As an NGO committed to providing legal advocacy on behalf of “marginalized, disempowered, and vulnerable groups,” IDEALS has been working on documenting the human rights violations occurring in the war on drugs for years.
As a Filipino-American, Morimoto was personally invested in and impacted by the work. Over the course of the summer, he read through transcripts of interviews of individuals alleging to be victims or relatives of victims of human rights violations, either extrajudicial killings or arbitrary arrests. Looking for trends in the data given to him, Morimoto found “evidence that the war on drugs campaign is in tension with international and domestic human rights law,” he said.
Morimoto described the experience as eye-opening, challenging his preconceived notions of human rights lawyering. Having expected international human rights bodies like the United Nations to more centrally figure in the organization’s strategy, he learned that “more of the important mechanisms for vindicating rights were domestic in nature,” he said. He was also surprised by how much IDEALS staff encouraged him to explore economic, social, and cultural rights, though he had come from a U.S.-education system where civil and political rights were more heavily emphasized.
In his internship, Morimoto also had the opportunity to draw on his mathematics background, discovering how integral statistics became for the organization’s documentation efforts.
“I initially thought the report was going to be most helpful as a case-by-case analysis of how the war on drugs violated the rights of people in the Philippines,” he said. “Through this approach, I was going to go through the each documentation of human rights violations and point to which portions of international and domestic human rights law they violated. However, staff encouraged me to look at trends in the data: how many of the victims had their homes broken into, how many of the victims were falsely labeled as nanlaban or ‘resisters’ after police had killed them, how many victims were uneducated, etc. This helped me learn that these trends can also be useful for human rights lawyering (in contrast to an individual, case-by-case analysis of each documentation), because it helps show that the human rights violations aren’t just isolated incidents: there is a government policy that systematically violates human rights.”
IDEALS staff encouraged Morimoto to take both a wide-eyed view of the trends and dive deeper into individual stories. Over the summer, he was exposed to heartbreaking descriptions and pictures of violence. The research made him see “how difficult human rights work can be.”
“In spite of all this,” he said, “it taught me that human rights is not just some lofty ideal discussed by people in iron towers. It is a tool that many people would like to use to find relief for injustice. Furthermore, it taught me that while the international human rights regime may have many, many flaws (particularly from the lens of developing countries, against whom human rights law appears to be disproportionately enforced compared to rich, Western countries), the fact remained that the people I was trying to help wanted to rely on this system to obtain justice, and that being an advocate sometimes meant setting aside your own views about a system to better fulfill the wishes of your clients.”
Morimoto described IDEALS staff as a family. They gave him the independence and autonomy to design his own project and methodology, while providing him with feedback and direction when he asked for it. At HLS, he hopes to continue to study armed conflict and public international law.
Interested in learning more about HRP Summer Fellowships? Schedule an advising appointment with Anna Crowe, Assistant Director of the International Human Rights Clinic, and apply to join our 2020 cohort today! Please note that you do not need to have a confirmed placement organization before you apply for the 2020 HRP summer fellowship pool. Applications are due February 1, 2020!
January 23, 2020
2019 HRP Summer Fellow Reflection: Matthew Farrell JD’21
Farrell spent summer 2019 at Amnesty International in London, UK
Summer fellowships for human rights internships are a central part of the Harvard Law School human rights experience. During the summer of 2019, HRP funded five HLS students to intern abroad at nongovernmental organizations for up to eight weeks. At the conclusion of their internships, students returned to HRP with a deeper appreciation for the type of work required of human rights practitioners. Over the course of January while our summer fellowship application is open, we’ll be excerpting portions from their fellowship reports to provide a glimpse into the kinds of experiences open to human rights students at Harvard Law.
Matthew Farrell had a strong foundation in international relations and human rights when he left for his summer at Amnesty International in London. After completing a human rights-focused Master’s and beginning law school, he wanted to use his 1L summer internship to dive into international criminal law. At Amnesty International, Farrell joined the Strategic Litigation Unit, which combats human rights violations through litigation that will have implications for actors – including individuals, communities, governments, and corporations – beyond the parties to the case. Much of the work he conducted in that unit focused on civil matters; however, the internship experience helped him understand how such core litigation skills could easily transfer into other arenas. In his role as an intern, Farrell contributed research, editing, drafting, and advising on a range of cases.
In his own words, he:
– researched and drafted sections of a third-party intervention submitted to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the case of Piskin v. Turkey. The brief addressed procedural rights in employment proceedings leading to the dismissal of an employee working with or for a State agency on grounds related to national security, including under a State of Emergency, as well as the application of the principles of legality and legal certainty and non-retroactivity as applied to national security, including in counter-terrorism;
– researched ECtHR precedent for a third-party intervention before the ECtHR in the case of Muhammed and Muhammed v. Romania regarding the use of classified material in ‘closed’ judicial proceedings – i.e. proceedings in which one party and their representative of choice are excluded for reasons of national security.
– familiarized himself with case documents (e.g. complaints, facts, appeals, motions, amicus briefs, and opinions), edited third-party interventions, participated in strategy sessions for civil and criminal cases, and communicated with courts for cases in which Amnesty intervened before the ECtHR and the International Criminal Court.
Farrell also had a unique opportunity to develop a cutting-edge strategy for human rights-based climate change litigation and advise on proposed litigation in this emerging field.
He elaborated, “Climate change is a new area for Amnesty International and in preparing the climate change litigation strategy, I also began developing connections between the unit and other actors within Amnesty International, as well as with other organizations that work on human rights and climate change.”
Farrell hopes to use this experience to continue to work on human rights litigation in the Clinic and elsewhere. In addition, because the placement largely revolved around appellate work, he is more heavily invested in that field.
For the 2019-2020 academic year, Farrell is enrolled as a student in the International Human Rights Clinic and an active member of HLS Advocates for Human Rights. Currently, he is undertaking an HRP Winter Fellowship at the International Criminal Court in the Hague this January.
Interested in learning more about HRP Summer Fellowships? Schedule an advising appointment with Anna Crowe, Assistant Director of the International Human Rights Clinic, and apply to join our 2020 cohort today! Please note that you do not need to have a confirmed placement organization before you apply for the 2020 HRP summer fellowship pool. Applications are due February 1, 2020!
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