Student Colloquium
Winners of the essay contest, along with other selected participants, are invited to present their papers during the human rights student colloquium. The colloquium, which will take place in spring 2012, will be an opportunity for students to present human rights papers and engage in open and lively discussion with other students and faculty members.
2012 Graduate Student Winners
Pope Pius XII, Rights Talk and the Dawn of the Religious Cold War
Giuliana Chamedes (), Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Ph.D. in History, ABD
From the early 1940s, Pope Pius XII began to advance an important language of rights, which denoted a new way of understanding church-state relations, and a new way of characterizing the leading friends and foes of the Catholic Church. His rights talk influenced lay Catholics in both the United States and Western Europe, by providing them with a framework for underwriting both the Allied cause in the Second World War and the Cold War consensus.
Challenges in the Interface between the State, Indigenous Peoples, and Bilateral Aid: the Philippine Department of Education, the Lumads of Mindanao, and AusAID
Erika Ileto Catral (), Teachers College, Columbia University - Master of Education in Anthropology and Education, 2nd year
Nation-states problematically define their political relationship with indigenous peoples as predicated on ambiguities pertaining to the nature of sovereignty, self-determination, identity, and culture. These prevailing ambiguities are manifested in a colonial anxiety that forcefully works upon indigenous peoples. I reflect on the ambiguities of these concepts as they are articulated in choking entanglements for the Lumad peoples of Mindanao within a colonial institution—the Philippine Department of Education—supported by bilateral intervention and the neoliberal politics of Australian foreign aid.
2012 Undergraduate Student Winners
International and Local Peacebuilding: Understanding Successes and Failures in Liberia and Somalia
Allison Namias Grossman (), Barnard College Political Science and Human Rights Studies, Senior
Civil wars are costly, complex political phenomena that evade quick fixes. Rebuilding societies in the wake of such devestation Why do peacebuilding missions succeed or fail after civil wars in low capacity states? Using a case study approach, this paper seeks to answer this question. The conflicts in Liberia and Somalia began similarly enough to allow a comparison of peacebuilding attempts to resolve both conflicts. Examining peace processes and treaty provisions in both conflicts along with the situational factors — the presence of civil society, previous experience with democratic institutions, the survival of political, economic, or cultural institutions, and the relationships with neighboring states — can help us to understand why peace was achievable in Liberia but still eludes Somalia.
Patterns and Advantages of Community-Based Resistance to Land Grabs in Madagascar and Ghana: What Lessons can be Learned for Sub-Saharan Africa as a Whole?
Elizabeth Fisher (), Columbia College, Human Rights Special Concentration and Philosophy Major, Senior
In this paper, I identify patterns of community-based resistance to land grabs by looking at two cases of successful resistance – resistance to the 2007 BioFuel Africa deal in Ghana and resistance to the 2008 Daewoo Logistics deal in Madagascar. I argue that community-based resistance is important because land grabs have severe negative effects on the local population, including dispossession of land, food and water insecurity, and lack of compensation; because the current drivers of the land grabbing phenomenon will continue to drive land grabs in the future, including food insecurity in wealthy developed nations, demand for biofuels, speculative investing in land, and FDI-attractive reforms in host countries; and because nascent top-down remedies for populations affected by land grabs, including international monitoring, host government regulation of foreign land investors, and transnational legal action, are not able to address the land grabbing phenomenon in a timely manner. The patterns of community-based resistance that I identify are the importance of individual leadership, NGOs, and dissemination of information in mobilizing the population against a land grab. These will be important in mobilizing resistance to the growing threat of land grabs.
2011 Graduate Student Winners
The Loliondo Massai Understood as "Conservation Refugees"
By: Jocelyn Courtney
In July of 2009, riot police burned eight Maasai villages in the Loliondo region of Tanzania to make a game reserve—part of a long chain of brutal acts perpetrated against this tribe. It is not hard to see that the Maasai in Tanzania have been victimized, but this paper argues that appealing to the international human rights regime in this type of situation should not be so automatic. It examines the human rights treaties that both sides might invoke, the Massai for the right to life and property, the government for the greater population’s right to conserve the land. The paper finds that the international human rights regime is actually part of the larger context in which the Maasai became vulnerable—compelling both their initial and their continued repression. It elucidates three problems with the current human rights movement: human rights tend to be structured in such absolute terms that they become limiting; individuals are too particularized; and activists rarely tailor their approach to local conditions. Without addressing these problems, appealing to international human rights will only further alienate the Maasai—reifying their “otherness,” and trapping them in a perpetual standoff with the government in which both sides can claim absolute rights.
“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom”: Historic Institutional Abuse and Transitional Justice in New Zealand
By: Matthew Windsor
Historic abuse claims against government agencies and psychiatric institutions have become an increasingly prominent feature of the civil litigation landscape in New Zealand over the past decade. International law requires that individuals whose human rights have been violated while detained by or under the care of the state must have access to an effective remedy. The argument advanced is that the New Zealand civil litigation system is not a propitious vehicle for effective relief in relation to historic abuse claims. Factors that preclude effective redress include evidential difficulties, public policy concerns in relation to the tort of negligence, operation of statutory limitation and immunity provisions, and legal aid restrictions. However, a critical examination of the New Zealand experience through a transitional justice lens enlarges the repertoire of viable remedial responses. The deployment of transitional justice mechanisms – an official apology followed by reparations, an increasing emphasis on truth-seeking and a heightened role for civil society – would enhance the remedial process in New Zealand. Such mechanisms would not replace the civil litigation system but would correct for its deficiencies in the historic abuse arena.
2011 Undergraduate Student Winners
The Rights of Migrant Labor: Farmworkers in Florida
By: Sarah Khan
Migrant agricultural workers in the United States face conditions ranging from sub-poverty wages and exclusion from social safety nets to circumstances that meet the legal standards of slavery. Almost half of these workers are undocumented and the political debate surrounding their situation is intertwined with a growing national concern about illegal immigration. Meanwhile, various human rights organizations have picked up on these workers’ plight; as evidenced by a recent increase in fair food campaigns across the US. This paper uses secondary sources and interviews with legal advocates to examine the mechanisms for the delivery (and denial) of rights of migrant farmworkers in Florida. It explores the challenges of organizing workers to collectively claim these rights, the loopholes in domestic law and the limitations to using an international legal framework for access to justice. An analysis of the sources reveals that much of the progress in Florida has been achieved through legal advocacy rather than collective organization; this speaks to an interesting general tension between human rights and labor rights movements and what happens when the twain meet. Another topic of interest is the ambiguous role of international law in this issue and the possibility for transnational arrangements.
LGBT Rights in Uganda and in International Law
By: Angelica Durón
Non-discrimination stands as one of the key tenets in the exercise and protection of human rights as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the African Charter on Human and People’s rights, amongst a variety of other international documents. However, the question of whether discrimination based on sexual orientation violates international human rights norms remains a highly contentious matter. The polarized debate surrounding the Anti Homosexuality Bill proposed by David Bahati in Uganda in 2009 represents a growing lack of consensus regarding the role of cultural and moral differences in applying human rights standards. This paper explores the applicability of international standards of nondiscrimination and protection to individuals identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender in contemporary Uganda. Therefore, it offers an analysis of the following: current law and proposed legislation in Uganda, human rights international and regional documents, legal precedents in international law and contrasting viewpoints among Ugandans. The work reveals the inconsistencies of anti-LGBT arguments, presents LGBT rights as fundamentally compatible with human rights and emphasizes the role of an active civil society in further protecting the rights of all individuals.
