Sanela Diana Jenkins
Mar 25 2015

Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series

In January through April 2011, the Program on Human Rights at Stanford University hosted the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series, a weekly series featuring presentations by leading scholars of human rights. The series comprised 10 high profile international and domestic human rights scholars, lawyers and activists who have made significant contributions to international justice, women and children’s rights, environmental rights and indigenous rights.

  • Human Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

    Madeleine Rees — Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia; Former head of the Women’s Rights and Gender Unit, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; Secretary General, Women’s International League for Peace and FreedomMadeleine Rees qualified as a lawyer in 1990 and became a partner in a large law firm in the UK in 1994 specializing in discrimination law, particularly in the area of employment, and public and administrative law and she did work on behalf of both the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission mainly on developing strategies to establish rights under domestic law through the identification of test cases to be brought before the courts. Madeleine brought cases both to the European Court of Human Rights and The European Court in Luxembourg. She was cited as one of the leading lawyers in the field of discrimination in the Chambers directory of British lawyers. In 1998 she began working for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as the gender expert and Head of Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In that capacity she worked extensively on the rule of law, gender and post conflict, transitional justice and the protection of social and economic rights.

    The Office in Bosnia was the first to take a case of rendition to Guantanamo before a court. The OHCHR office dealt extensively with the issue of trafficking and Madeleine was a member of the expert coordination group of the trafficking task force of the Stability Pact, thence the Alliance against Trafficking. From September 2006 to April 2010 she was the head of the Women’s rights and gender unit. For the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, focusing on using law to describe the different experiences of men and women, particularly post conflict. The aim was to better understand and interpret the concept of Security using human rights law as complementary to humanitarian law and how to make the human rights machinery more responsive and therefore more effective from a gender perspective.

  • How is Obama doing on Human Rights?

    Kenneth Roth — Executive Director at Human Rights WatchKenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations, which operates in more than 80 countries. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 1987, Roth served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations.

    Please join the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, in welcoming Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch for a special event on the topic of President Obama’s human rights record. Mr. Roth will speak about the US response to human rights abuses around the world, including recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.

    The event was chaired by Professor David Abernethy, Professor Emeritus in the Stanford department of Political Science.

    Executive Director Kenneth Roth assessed the Obama Administration’s human rights record. How has the president done in addressing the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa? How has he performed on legacy issues, such as Guantanamo and torture? How has he handled competing national interests in places like China? Has his greater emphasis on multilateral diplomacy, especially at the United Nations, helped or hurt the promotion of human rights?

  • Reparations, Restitution, and Transitional Justice

    Larry May — W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University

    Larry May is a political philosopher who has written on conceptual issues in collective and shared responsibility, as well as normative issues in international criminal law. He has also written on professional ethics and on the Just War tradition.

    In addition to being W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, he is also a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He has previously taught at Washington University, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, and University of Connecticut.

    He has published 25 books and 100 articles. His five most recent authored books have been published by Cambridge University Press, including: Genocide: A Normative Account (2010) and Global Justice and Due Process (2011).

    His authored books have won awards from the American Philosophical Association, the North American Society for Social Philosophy, the International Association of Penal Law, the American Society of International Law, and the American Library Association. His writings have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

    Professor May has lectured extensively around the world, including, in the last two years, keynote or plenary addresses at conferences in: Oxford, St. Andrews, Oslo, Helsinki, Krakow, Belgrade, Bielefeld, The Hague, Delft, Leiden, Montreal, Victoria, Toronto, Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney.

    He has served on the board of directors of the American Philosophical Association and is past president of AMINTAPHIL, the American section of the International Society for Philosophy of Law. In addition, he has occasionally taken a criminal appeals case, and has worked on several death penalty cases, in the United States.

  • Never Again: Perspectives on Preventing Mass Killings

    David Pressman — Director for War Crimes and Atrocities on the National Security Council, White HouseDavid Pressman is an American human rights lawyer and former aide to United States Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. Pressman served as an advisor to Secretary Janet Napolitano and Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. Recently he was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Director for War Crimes and Atrocities on the National Security Council at the White House, where he coordinates the Government’s efforts to prevent and respond to mass atrocities, genocide, and war crimes.

    Pressman also advises a number of highly-visible individuals on foreign policy and related advocacy strategies. A 2008 Los Angeles Times article referred to him as George Clooney’s “consigliere.” With George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Jerry Weintraub, Pressman co-founded Not On Our Watch, a leading advocacy and grantmaking organization focused on raising awareness about mass-atrocities.

  • The Right to Culture as a Human Right: Law in a Multicultural World

    Alison Renteln — Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern CaliforniaAlison Dundes Renteln is a Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California where she teaches Law and Public Policy with an emphasis on international law and human rights. A graduate of Harvard (History and Literature), she has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from the USC Law School. She served as Director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics and as Vice-Chair of the Department of Political Science. In 2005 she received the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (campus-wide). Her publications include The Cultural Defense (Oxford), which received the 2006 USC Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creativity in Research. Her book co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets, Multicultural Jurisprudence: Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense was published in 2009 (Hart) and featured in the California Bar Journal (February issue). Another collection, Cultural Diversity and Law: State Responses from Around the World, co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets and Jean-Francois Gaudreault-Desbiens, was published in 2010 (Bruylant). Cultural Law: International, National, and Indigenous, co-authored with James Nafziger and Robert Paterson, was also published 2010 (Cambridge). Two of her essays appeared in a special issue of Judicature on cross-cultural jurisprudence (March-April 2009) and another on this topic in The Judges’ Journal of the American Bar Association (Spring, 2010). Her current project is a study of the jurisprudence of names.

    Professor Renteln has collaborated with the United Nations on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She lectured on comparative legal ethics in Bangkok and Manila at ABA-sponsored conferences. She has often taught seminars on the rights of ethnic minorities for judges, lawyers, court interpreters, jury consultants, and police officers. During the past few years she participated on panels on cross-cultural justice at the meetings of the American Bar Association, the National Association of Women Judges, the North American South Asian Bar Association, the American Society of Trial Consultants, and others. She served on several California civil rights commissions and the California committee of Human Rights Watch. She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the American Society of International Law, the Law and Society Association, and the Commission on Legal Pluralism.

  • The Justification of Human Rights

    John Tasioulas — Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College LondonJohn Tasioulas joined the University of College London in January 2011 as the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence. He was previously a Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has also taught at the universities of Melbourne and Glasgow and has held visiting research posts at Melbourne and the Australian National University. His research grants include two Research Leave Awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2001 and 2004) and a British Academy Research Development Award (2008-2010) for a monograph-length project on the philosophy of human rights. He is currently a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and serves on the editorial boards of the American Society of International Law Studies in International Legal Theory and the Journal of Applied Philosophy. He is the author of numerous published articles on the legal and moral philosophy of international law and is co-editor of The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2010)

    Professor Tasioulas’ research interests revolve around Socrates’ question, ‘How should one live?’, and the attempt to draw out the moral, political and legal implications of an acceptable answer to it. One strand of this inquiry focuses on the philosophy of human rights. Professor Tasioulas is currently engaged in writing a monograph that develops a pluralistic, interest-based account of human rights, one that—among other things—seeks to provide us with the intellectual resources to respond to the familiar objection that human rights reflect merely Western values.

    Professor Tasioulas also has on-going research interests in a number of other topics, including the nature of moral wrong-doing and the responses appropriate to it, the components of human well-being, the plurality of ethical values, as well as meta-ethical questions about the reality of moral values and the possibility of moral knowledge.

  • Contextualizing Transitional Justice in Brazil

    James Cavallaro — Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard University and Executive Director of the Human Rights ProgramAfter graduation from Harvard College in 1984, Cavallaro spent several years working with Central American refugees on the U.S.-Mexico border and with rights groups in Chile challenging abuses by the Pinochet government. He studied at Boalt Hall (University of California at Berkeley School of Law), where he served on the California Law Review and was graduated with Order of the Coif Honors. Cavallaro clerked for the Hon. Dolores K. Sloviter, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (1993-1994). In 1994, he opened a joint office for Human Rights Watch and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) in Rio de Janeiro, and served as director of the office, overseeing research, reporting and litigation against Brazil before the Inter-American system’s human rights bodies. In 1999, he founded the Global Justice Center, now a leading Brazilian human Rights NGO, which he directed until arriving at HLS in 2002.

    Professor Cavallaro’s research interests include Human Rights Practice, Civil Society and Social Movements.

  • The Right to Culture as a Human Right: Law in a Multicultural World

    Alison Renteln — Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern CaliforniaAlison Dundes Renteln is a Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California where she teaches Law and Public Policy with an emphasis on international law and human rights. A graduate of Harvard (History and Literature), she has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from the USC Law School. She served as Director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics and as Vice-Chair of the Department of Political Science. In 2005 she received the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (campus-wide). Her publications include The Cultural Defense (Oxford), which received the 2006 USC Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creativity in Research. Her book co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets, Multicultural Jurisprudence: Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense was published in 2009 (Hart) and featured in the California Bar Journal (February issue). Another collection, Cultural Diversity and Law: State Responses from Around the World, co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets and Jean-Francois Gaudreault-Desbiens, was published in 2010 (Bruylant). Cultural Law: International, National, and Indigenous, co-authored with James Nafziger and Robert Paterson, was also published 2010 (Cambridge). Two of her essays appeared in a special issue of Judicature on cross-cultural jurisprudence (March-April 2009) and another on this topic in The Judges’ Journal of the American Bar Association (Spring, 2010). Her current project is a study of the jurisprudence of names.

    Professor Renteln has collaborated with the United Nations on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She lectured on comparative legal ethics in Bangkok and Manila at ABA-sponsored conferences. She has often taught seminars on the rights of ethnic minorities for judges, lawyers, court interpreters, jury consultants, and police officers. During the past few years she participated on panels on cross-cultural justice at the meetings of the American Bar Association, the National Association of Women Judges, the North American South Asian Bar Association, the American Society of Trial Consultants, and others. She served on several California civil rights commissions and the California committee of Human Rights Watch. She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the American Society of International Law, the Law and Society Association, and the Commission on Legal Pluralism.

  • Decreasing Mugabe’s Power by Increasing People Power in Zimbabwe

    Jenni Williams — National Coordinator at WOZA ZimbabweWOZA, the acronym of Women of Zimbabwe Arise, is an Ndebele word meaning “come forward.” Now with a countrywide membership of over 75,000 women and men, WOZA was formed in 2003 as a women’s civic movement to:

    • Provide women, from all walks of life, with a united voice to speak out on issues affecting their day-to-day lives.
    • Empower female leadership that will lead community involvement in pressing for solutions to the current crisis.
    • Encourage women to stand up for their rights and freedoms.
    • Lobby and advocate on those issues affecting women and their families.

    Jenni Williams, WOZA’s national coordinator, was profiled in a 2008 New York Times article:

    During years when millions of her compatriots fled abroad to escape hardship and repression—among them her mother, husband and three children, now in their 20s—Mrs. Williams, 46, a stocky high school dropout with a gift for grassroots organizing, has lived underground in Zimbabwe, moving from safe house to safe house as she and her colleagues have built a formidable protest movement among the church women of Harare and Bulawayo, the two largest cities.

    “Zimbabwe is my home, so why should I go?” she asked. “We have made a pact as a family. I am supposed to prepare Zimbabwe so everyone can come home.”

    And from the The Guardian:

    At 47, Jenni Williams has experienced more brutality than most of us will face in a lifetime. She is the founder of the underground activist movement Women of Zimbabwe Arise (Woza), an organisation that, since 2003, has been mobilising Zimbabwean women to demonstrate in defence of their political, economic and social rights. In a fragmented country where women are marginalised by patriarchy, downtrodden by severe financial hardship (official inflation runs at 7,000%) and weakened by the acute lack of food or clothing for themselves and their children, Williams faces an almost insurmountable daily struggle simply to keep going.

    Under Mugabe’s dictatorship, the threat of state-sanctioned violence is ever-present. Despite being a movement dedicated to peaceful protest, Woza’s 70,000 members are routinely arrested, beaten and intimidated.

    As an outspoken critic of the current Zimbabwean regime, Williams is one of the most troublesome thorns in Mugabe’s side. In a region where anti-government protesters have an uncomfortable habit of disappearing or turning up dead, her day-to-day existence is hazardous: although her main residence is in Bulawayo, south-west Zimbabwe, she moves in and out of safe houses and never stays more than six months in one place. She has been arrested 33 times.

  • The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics

    Kathryn Sikkink — Regents Professor and the McKnight Presidential Chair in Political Science at the University of MinnesotaKathryn Sikkink is a Regents Professor and the McKnight Presidential Chair in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She has a M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. Her publications include Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America; Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck); The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp); Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms (co-edited with Sanjeev Khagram and James Riker); and Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina. Her book Activist Beyond Borders was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, and the International Studies Association Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations. Her newest book The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2011. Sikkink has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina, and has received a Guggenheim fellowship for her research on human rights prosecutions in the world. She is a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Association for Arts and Sciences, and a member of the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, and International Organization.

    Her current research interests focus on the influence of international law on domestic politics, especially in the area of human rights, transnational social movements and networks, and on the role of ideas and norms in international relations and foreign policy. With the support of the Twentieth Century Fund, she is currently involved in a research project on the international human rights idea and the evolution and effectiveness of human rights policies, especially in Latin America.

  • The Evolving Transnational Legal Order

    Karen Alter — Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University; Northwestern Law School (courtesy appointment)Karen Alter’s current research investigates how the proliferation of international legal mechanisms is changing international relations. Her book in progress, The New Terrain of International Law: International Courts in International Politics provides a new framework for comparing and understanding the influence of the twenty-four existing international courts, and for thinking about how different domains of domestic and international politics are transformed through the creation of international courts.

    Alter is author of: The European Court’s Political Power (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Establishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe. (Oxford University Press, 2001) and more than forty articles and book chapters on the politics of international law and courts. Recent publications investigate the politics of international regime complexity, how delegation of authority to international courts reshapes domestic and international relations, and politics in the Andean Community’s legal system.

    Professor Alter teaches courses on international law, international organizations, ethics in international affairs, and the international politics of human rights at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

    Alter has been a German Marshall Fund Fellow, a Howard Foundation research fellow and an Emile Noel scholar at Harvard Law School. Her research has also been supported by the DAAD and France’s Chateaubriand fellowship. She has been a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation where she is an associate scholar of the Center on Law and Globalization, Northwestern University’s School of Law, Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, Institute d’Etudes Politiques, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Auswartiges Politik, Universität Bremen, and Seikei University. Fluent in Italian, French and German, Alter serves on the editorial board of European Union Politics and Law and Social Inquiry and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

  • Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics

    Beth Simmons — Director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs; Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs, Department of Government, Harvard UniversityBeth Simmons is Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University. She received her PhD. from Harvard University in the Department of Government. She has taught international relations, international law, and international political economy at Duke University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard. Her book, Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years, 1924-1939, was recognized by the American Political Science Association in 1995 as the best book published in 1994 in government, politics, or international relations. She has worked at the International Monetary Fund with the support of a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship (1995-1996), has spent as year as a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (1996-1997), and a year in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2002-2003). She currently serves as Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Her new book entitled Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics is forthcoming this year (2009) from Cambridge University Press. Simmons was elected in April 2009 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.