The Program for Medical Professionals, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law
A Program Sponsored by the Skirball Foundation
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program (HRP) has launched a five-year project concerning health professionals and human rights and humanitarian law standards. The Program for Medical Professionals, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law - sponsored by the Skirball
Foundation -- will draw on historical and contemporary examples involving health professionals and legal/ethical norms. The
Program will convene a series of interdisciplinary workshops to explore a number of considerations, including: the institutional and structural pressures operating on such professionals; the role of individual agency and responsibility in various institutional settings; the identification of gaps and conflicts around relevant laws and ethical norms; and the development of useful interventions to strengthen awareness and adherence to legal and ethical frameworks, as well as to remedy ongoing and past violations.
By relying on expertise from diverse disciplinary and professional perspectives (e.g., law, medicine, public health, sociology, political science, history), this Program aims to create synergies among workshop participants and serve as a catalyst for critical reflection, comparative analysis and relevant collaborative scholarship on the topic. The ideas generated by this multidisciplinary approach will feed directly into policy and advocacy activities, to be pursued potentially by the International Human Rights Clinic.
Expected outputs of workshops include academic articles, syllabi/curriculum reform, policy analysis papers, and strategy papers for pursuing structural reform and enforcement of violations.
SPECIFIC SUBJECT AREAS
In pursuit of the above agenda, the Program is exploring three potential subject areas. An initial workshop will begin with a broad framework for assessing the Program's potential role in facilitating interdisciplinary engagement with the general topic. Subsequent workshops may analyze specific issue areas such as (a) Medical Professionals and Coercive Interrogation and (b) Global Forensic Medicine and Human Rights Violations.
For more information on this Program, please contact:
Mindy Jane Roseman
Academic Director
Human Rights Program
mroseman@law.harvard.edu
617-495-6912
Deoborah Popowski
Project Coordinator
Skirball Fellow
dpopowski@law.harvard.edu
617-495-0792