Events

Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on National Human Rights Institutions, State Compliance and Social Change

September 10-11, 2009
A Joint Harvard Law School Human Rights Program/New York University Center for Human Rights and Global Justice Workshop

Participant Profiles

Sonia Cardenas
Sonia Cardenas is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Human Rights Program at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She is the author of Conflict and Compliance: State Responses to International Human Rights Pressure and Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope. Her work on NHRIs spans over a decade, including Chains of Justice: The Global Rise of State Institutions for Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). Her research in this area has appeared in edited volumes and journals, including Global Governance, Human Rights Quarterly, Human Rights Review, International Political Science Review, and Middle East Journal. Cardenas’s work on NHRIs has also been supported by various grants and visiting fellowships at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at Cambridge University.

Richard Carver
Richard Carver is Associate Professor at Oxford Brookes University and a long-time British human rights activist, formerly of Amnesty International and the freedom of expression NGO, Article 19.  He is the author of various books and articles on the work of NHRIs, including Assessing the Effectiveness of National Human Rights Institutions (International Council on Human Rights Policy, 2005) and with Paul Hunter, National Human Rights Institutions in Africa. In Kamel Hossain (ed.), Human rights commission and ombudsman offices: national experiences throughout the world (Kluwer, 2000).

Christopher Elmendorf
Christopher Elmendorf is a Professor of Law at UC Davis Law School. Professor Elmendorf’s varied teaching and research interests include election law, administrative law, constitutional law, and property and natural resources law. His recent writings have focused on (1) the roles that ongoing advisory bodies can play in fostering governmental accountability and sustaining the foundational commitments of liberal democracy, and (2) judicial formulation and administration of doctrines to implement the fundamental right to vote. His work has been published in the New York University Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Election Law Journal, among other journals. His article, Advisory Counterparts to Constitutional Courts, 56 Duke L.J. 1366 (2007) was selected for the 2006 Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum.

Kieren Fitzpatrick
Kieren Fitzpatrick has been the Director of the Asia Pacific Form Secretariat since its inception in 1996. The APF is the most developed of the four regional networks of NHRIs in the world with the most advanced level of cooperation between members. Currently, the APF is made up of 14 full member institutions and three associate members stretching from Palestine in the west, across Asia and down to the Pacific. His publications include (2001) ‘The Asia Pacific Forum: A Partnership for Regional Human Rights Cooperation,’ The Danish Center for Human Rights.

Julie Mertus
Julie Mertus is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the MA program in Ethics, Peace and Global Affairs at American University. During academic year 2006-2007, she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Denmark where she worked with the Danish Institute of Human Rights. A graduate of Yale Law School, her work focuses on human rights, U.S. foreign policy, refugee and humanitarian law and policy, gender and conflict and post-war transitions. Her prior appointments include: Senior Fellow, U.S. Institute of Peace; Human Rights Fellow, Harvard Law School; Writing Fellow, MacArthur Foundation, Fulbright Fellow (Romania), and Counsel, Human Rights Watch. Her eight books include Human Rights Matters: Local Politics and National Human Rights Institutions (2009) and Bait and Switch: Human Rights and US Foreign Policy (2004), which was named Human Rights Book of the Year by the American Political Science Association Human Rights Section.

David S. Meyer
David S. Meyer is a Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Planning, Policy, and Design. Professor Meyer’s general areas of interest include social movements, political sociology, and public policy, and he is most directly concerned with the relationships between social movements and the political contexts in which they emerge. He teaches courses on social movements, social problems, and sociological theory. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Boston University, and a B.A. from Hampshire College, where he studied literature. His publications include The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007; Meyer, Valerie Jenness, and Helen Ingram, eds. Routing the Opposition: Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy in America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005 and Meyer and Sidney Tarrow, eds., The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

Obiora Okafor
Obiora Okafor is a Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School. He has served as an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program and was recently named a Canada-US Fulbright Scholar at MIT. He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded study relating to human rights activism in Nigeria, as well as on a project examining the comparative character of refugee rights in the Canada and the USA post 9/11. He has served as an expert panelist for the United Nations Working Group on People of African Descent, and as a human rights consultant for the British Department for International Development. Professor Okafor has published extensively in the fields of international human rights law and refugee law, as well as general public international law. Professor Okafor is the author of The African Human Rights System, Activist Forces, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Legitimizing Human Rights NGOs: Lessons from Nigeria (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2006); and Re-Defining Legitimate Statehood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2000), among other publications.

Enrique Peruzzoti
Dr. Enrique Peruzzotti is associate professor of political science and international relations at Torcuato Di Tella University, in Buenos Aires. He has taught courses on political science, sociology, and Latin American Studies at universities around the world, including the University of Buenos Aires, of Minas Gerais, FLACSO Ecuador, Cornell University, and the American University in Paris. He has authored numerous articles and book chapters and has co-edited four books, Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in Latin America (2006, in English), Participatory Innovations and Representative Democracy in Latin America (forthcoming, in English), “The Return of the People. Populism and New Democracies in Latin America” (2008, in Spanish) and Keeping Politicians in Check: Citizens and Methods in New Latin American Democracies (2002, in Spanish). He is currently a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington DC.

Linda Reif
Linda Reif (University of Windsor, LL.B., 1982, and University of Cambridge LL.M., 1985) is CN Professor of International Trade at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta, Canada. She has published widely on national human rights institutions (NHRIs), including her book, The Ombudsman, Good Governance and the International Human Rights System (Martinus Nijhoff Pub., 2004), and law review articles such as “Building Democratic Institutions: The Role of National Human Rights Institutions in Good Governance and Human Rights Protection” (2000) 13 Harvard Human Rights Journal 1-69 and “the Ombudsman and the Protection of Children’s Rights” (2009) 17 Asia Pacific Law Review (forthcoming). Professor Reif was Editor of Publications, International Ombudsman Institute, from 1989 to 2009, editing The International Ombudsman Yearbook (Martinus Nijhoff). She has provided consulting services and academic support on NHRIs to the Commonwealth Secretariat. In 1991 she was Director of Legal Services, Office of the Alberta Ombudsman.

Catherine Renshaw
Catherine Renshaw is a Research Fellow at the Australian Human Rights Centre, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales and Director of the Centre’s project on National Human Rights Institutions in the Asia Pacific: the role of the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions.   Recent publications include Andrew Byrnes, Andrea Durbach and Catherine Renshaw (2008), Joining the club: the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions, the Paris Principles, and the advancement of human rights protection in the region, 14(1) Australian Journal of Human Rights; and Catherine Renshaw, Andrew Byrnes, Andrea Durbach, Implementing Human Rights in the Pacific Through the Work of National Human Rights Institutions: the Experience of Fiji, University of New South Wales Law Research Series 2008, No. 66.

Peter Rosenblum
Peter Rosenblum is the Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein Clinical Professor of Human Rights Law at Columbia University Law School.  Previously, he served as associate and clinical director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard from 1996 until 2002.  He has had a wide range of experience outside academia. He was a human rights officer with the Geneva-based precursor to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a program director of the International Human Rights Law Group, and a researcher for both Human Rights Watch and the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights. He has engaged in human rights research and field missions in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, though he continues to maintain a strong interest in Africa, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo.  His publications include Human Rights Watch (2001), Protectors or Pretenders? Government Human Rights Commission in Africa, New York: Human Rights Watch. Recent writing addresses human rights topics affecting Africa and human rights pedagogy in the United States.

Chris Sidoti
Chris Sidoti is adjunct professor at the University of Western Sydney, Griffith University (Queensland) and the Australian Catholic University, a Fellow of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University and an Affiliate at the Sydney Centre for International Law at the University of Sydney. He has been Australian Human Rights Commissioner (1995-2000), Australian Law Reform Commissioner (1992-1995) and Foundation Director of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1987-1992).

Mark Ungar
Mark Ungar is Associate Professor of political science at Brooklyn College and of criminal justice in the doctoral program at the City University of New York (CUNY). He has written and edited several books and about 30 articles and book chapters on judicial reform, citizen security, and policing. He has worked as an advisor to the United Nations, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, and Honduras. He has had grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the CUNY Research Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the law co-chair of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). He is currently completing a book on citizen security reform in Latin America and an edited volume on community policing in the region.