Annual ReportJune 2012 – May 2013

Northeastern University School of Law

Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy

Promoting Human Rights in the United States and Around the World

1Cover art: Water Power: The Water Science Mural, David Fichter, Commissioned by the Wisconsin Arts Board 1992

PHRGE Faculty Co-Directors MessageDear Friends:

We are proud to share with new and old friends this overview of PHRGE’s work for the past year. Under Kevin Murray’s leadership as Executive Director and with the addition of Mariah McGill as PHRGE’s capable Associate Director, we expanded to new areas of work while at the same time deepening our longstanding commitments to promoting Economic, Social and Cultural (ESC) rights and development at home and abroad.

Interdisciplinarity was a theme throughout the year, as we continued to explore the ways in which human rights norms can inform and mobilize communities, increasing momen-tum for progressive change across disciplines. For example, our 2012 Institute on health and human rights opened new possibilities for interdisciplinary dialogue and progress on fundamental public health indicators. Our project on the human right to water brought us into collaboration with engineers whose work on clean water and sanitation has pro-found implications for communities around the world. Our regional colloquia engaged philosophers and social scientists as well as lawyers in thinking deeply about issues ranging from statelessness to water rights. At the same time, we continued our pioneering work on human rights in the U.S., participating in judicial education initiatives and practitioner trainings, writing articles for both law reviews and widely-read practitioner journals, and participating in strategic litigation designed to maximize the impact of human rights law at home. As always, our students are central participants and drivers for much of this work.

In the pages that follow, we invite you to learn more about PHRGE’s work over this productive year, and to join us in envisioning and, when necessary, inventing the ways to ensure ESC rights for all.

Very truly yours,

PHRGE Faculty Dan Danielsen Martha F. Davis Lucy A. Williams Margaret Y. K. Woo

Mission

The Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy (PHRGE) at the Northeastern University School of Law (NUSL) was founded in 2005 to engage in the study, promo-tion, implementation and constructive critique of rights-based approaches to econom-ic development and social transformation with particular attention to economic, social and cultural rights. It has a threefold mission:

(1) To promote human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights, within the Northeastern community;

(2) To support cutting-edge scholarship on human rights with a particular focus on economic, social and cultural rights;

(3) To work to implement human rights norms and sound economic develop-ment approaches worldwide.

Contents

PHRGE Community Events 3-4 PHRGE Co-op Fellowships 5-6 PHRGE Programs Health and Human Rights 7-8PHRGE Programs in Development 9 Education Resource Rights PHRGE Projects Right to Water 10 Bringing International Human Rights Law into Domestic Forums 11

PHRGE Affiliated Projects The International Social and Economic Rights Project (iSERP) 12 Due Diligence Project 13 PHRGE Publications 13-15 PHRGE New England Regional Faculty Colloquia 15 PHRGE Affiliated Faculty Notes 16-20PHRGE Partner Organizations 21 PHRGE Who We Are 22

Mission and Contents

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Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The past year has been a time of both transition and continuity at PHRGE. While successfully managing a transition in key staff positions, PHRGE continued to take steps toward the consolidation of a collaborative, law-school-based center at Northeastern University for the advancement of human rights, especially economic, social and cultural rights, worldwide.

These steps involved work in each of PHRGE’s main areas of activity: educating key constituencies about human rights, promoting human rights scholarship and building connections between university-based researchers and rights advocacy groups and working to implement human rights norms and sound economic development approaches worldwide. Among the highlights of the year’s work were:

1. The 2012 PHRGE Institute, which brought together over 150 academics, advocates and health practitioners to discuss the connections between human rights and the “social determinants of health” in the United States;

2. The 20th in the series of Valerie Gordon Memorial Lectures, this one by Professor Philip Alston of New York University Law School entitled, “Promoting Social Rights: Has the UN Done its Job?”;

3. PHRGE Co-Directors, affiliated faculty and staff published several articles in practitioner journals including the National Law Journal, the Poverty Race and Action Council Newsletter and the Health and Human Rights Journal;

4. The release of an issue of the Northeastern University Law Journal bringing together the papers resulting from the 2012 PHRGE Institute on “Framing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for Advocacy and Mobilization”;

5. Sponsored by the governments of Germany and Malaysia, the Due Diligence Project hosted a workshop at the United Nations on “Due Diligence from the Ground Up: State Compliance to End Violence Against Women”;

6. PHRGE affiliate, Professor Leo Beletsky, was a lead contributor to a study released by Open Society Foundations entitled, “Advancing Human Rights in Patient Care: The Law in Seven Transitional Countries”;

7. Collaboration with the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty and the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School on the presentation of a continuing legal education symposium that drew over 125 people to discuss “Bringing Economic and Social Rights Home: the Right to Adequate Housing in the United States”; and

8. The International Social and Economic Rights Project (iSERP) hosted an international conference on the theme, “Social and Economic Rights in Theory and Practice: a Critical Assessment” to review contributions to a forthcoming volume of the same name.

These activities, as well as everything else done by PHRGE over the course of the past year, have in common a desire to demonstrate the power of the international human rights framework as both an analytical and an advocacy tool. PHRGE believes that there are multiple paths to change, but that a human rights perspective can add value to the work of activists, academics and practitioners, regardless of which path to change they have chosen.

Given the challenges that face those who would advance human rights, PHRGE’s mission is by its nature one of building partnerships across barriers to change. If you see com-mon ground between your goals and approach and our own, please join us in thinking about how working together might add value to your mission and ours.

Sincerely,

Kevin MurrayExecutive Director

PHRGE Highlights June 2012 to May 2013

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June 6, 2012: PHRGE co-sponsored a web-streamed panel, “UN Guiding Principles for Ethics and Hu-man Rights: What Lawyers Should Know” which explored corporate social responsibil-ity and legal ethics. Moderated by Oxfam America’s Chris Jochnick, the panel featured Sarah Altschuller of Foley Hoag, John Sherman, General Counsel of Shift and Professor Martha Davis, PHRGE Faculty Co-Director.

June 18, 2012: PHRGE hosted Dr. Siobhan McInerney-Lankford, Senior Policy Officer of Operations Policy and Country Services of the World Bank for a lecture on human rights and de-velopment.

September 5, 2012: PHRGE Fellowship panel, featuring current Fellowship employers and former Program Fellows.

September 13, 2012: PHRGE hosted a lively research session on international and comparative human rights law with Kyle Courtney, Manager, Resource Sharing and Faculty Information Delivery at Harvard Law School and PHRGE Affiliated Scholar.

September 27, 2012: Executive Director Kevin Murray moderated the PHRGE Showcase panel, designed to increase knowledge of human rights in the Law School community and participation in PHRGE program activities.

October 18, 2012:PHRGE co-sponsored “Walking the Word with Colombia’s Indigenous Peoples,” fea-turing Ms. Ligna Pulido. Ms. Pulido spoke about indigenous activism in Colombia and illuminated the connections between militarization, international trade, land rights and environmental protection.

October 25, 2012: PHRGE Faculty Co-Director Martha Davis served as Co-Chair and PHRGE as a Partici-pating Organization for the 2012 Armenian Heritage Foundation Najarian Lecture on Human Rights. Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian delivered the keynote address on Oc-tober 25 at Faneuil Hall.

November 14, 2012: PHRGE Faculty Co-Director Martha Davis gave a presentation to the Newton Human Rights Commission on the Boston Principles on the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of Noncitizens. The talk focused on how the Boston Principles could promote and expand the work of human rights commissions here in the United States.

January 18, 2013: PHRGE hosted a viewing followed by a discussion of a live-streamed program orga-nized by the American Bar Association. The program commemorated the 50th anni-versary of the Gideon v. Wainwright Supreme Court decision.

February 5, 2013: PHRGE co-hosted a reception with the Northeastern University Law Journal to cele-brate the release of the Law Journal issue on “Framing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for Mobilization and Advocacy: Towards a Strategic Agenda.”

PHRGE Community Events

February 6, 2013: PHRGE hosted a stimulating lunch-time seminar on international and human rights legal research, led by Jootaek “Juice” Lee, senior research librarian at NUSL.

February 12, 2013: PHRGE’s Executive Director, Kevin Murray, spoke at NUSL’s “Global Law-Palooza,” an event organized by the International Law Society to increase student awareness re-garding international and global law resources and opportunities at the Law School.

March 7, 2013: With sponsorship from the Government of Germany, the Due Diligence Project a PHRGE Affiliated Project, hosted a public panel discussion at the United Nations entitled “Due Diligence from the Ground Up: State Compliance to End Violence against Women” in New York City.

March 11, 2013: Kevin Murray moderated a panel discussion “What Can We Do? A Policy and Advocacy Primer for Nonprofits and Organizations,” at a conference for Boston-area foundations and nonprofits sponsored by Northeastern Students4Giving.

March 12, 2013: In collaboration with the Seminar on Human Rights: Race, Gender and Culture, PHRGE sponsored a discussion by Cecilie Counts, Legislative Representative for the AFL-CIO entitled “From Free South Africa to U.S. Workers’ Rights: A Public Interest Lawyer’s Journey.”

April 11, 2013:PHRGE co-sponsored a lecture at Suffolk University School of Law by Professor S. James Anaya, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, entitled “Reflec-tions on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

April 11, 2013:PHRGE participated in a panel hosted by the Office of Opportunities for Student Dis-tinction to make students aware of the many benefits of completing a PHRGE fellow-ship.

May 31, 2013:PHRGE hosted Peter Sabonis ’82 of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative for an informal discussion on the role attorneys can play in promoting economic hu-man rights in the United States.

Philip Alston

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The Valerie Gordon Human Rights Lecture

On March 27, 2013 PHRGE, in collaboration with the NUSL Chapter of the Black Law Students Association hosted the 20th Annual Valerie Gordon Human Rights Lecture. The lecture was established in honor of the late Valerie Gordon, a 1993 NUSL graduate and advocate for human rights in the U.S. and internationally. During her time at NUSL she was an active member of the Black Law Students Association and co-founder of the Students of Color Coalition, which advocated for an increased awareness and law school action on faculty and student diversity, an end to institutional racism and attention to race, culture and difference in the law school curriculum. Gordon tragically lost her life to a sudden illness shortly after graduating from NUSL. The Gordon Lecture honors her memory by inviting outstanding lawyers, judges, scholars and advocates who work to ad-vance human rights and social justice. Professor Philip Alston of New York University Law School and Co-Chair of the New York University Center for Human Rights and Global Justice delivered the 2013 lecture, entitled “Promoting Social Rights: Has the UN Done its Job?”

BLSA Human Rights Essay Contest

Each year in conjunction with the Valerie Gordon Lecture, the Northeastern University Chapter of the Black Law Students Association sponsors a human rights essay contest for first-year students. The “Spirit of Valerie Gordon Award” is presented at the Valerie Gordon Lecture each spring. The 2013 essay winner was “Enforcing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: A Stark Dichotomy” by Scheagbe Mayumi Grigsby ’15.

Valerie Gordon ’93

Susan Maze-Rothstein, S. Mayumi Grigsby ’15, Tiffany Malcolm ’13

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PHRGE Fellows work at leading human rights organizations in the United States and abroad. Each Fellow receives a stipend to work full time for eleven weeks as a staff member at a partner organization. Most of the PHRGE Fellows work at organizations with which we have an ongoing relationship and four students rotate through each position over the year. New Fellows are then able to build directly on the work of prior Fellows, encouraging employers to engage students in the full range of the organiza-tion’s work.

2012-2013 PHRGE Fellows

Spring 2013Human Rights Law Network (HRLN): Briana Olson ’13Oxfam America: Dave Rini ’13Physicians for Human Rights (PHR): Casey Shupe ’13

Winter 2012-13 HRLN: Julia Butner ’13Maryland Legal Aid, Bureau: Frank Vitale ’14Oxfam America: Adam Cernea-Clark ’14 & Amy Pimantel ’14 National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP): Katherine Crossman ’13 Fall 2012 HRLN: Jillian Sadler ’13NLCHP: Shelbey Wolf ’14 Oxfam America: Nicole Santiago ’14

Summer 2012HRLN: Shaneka Davis ’14Oxfam America: Aradhana Tiwari ’14

Open Fellowships

Zara Day ’14, Peace Tones, Cambridge, MAStephanie Gharakhanian ’13, Proyecto de Derechos Economicos, Sociales y Culturales (ProDESC), Mexico City, MexicoJ.M. Kirby ’13, Action Program for Equality and Social Inclusion (PAIIS), Bogota, ColombiaJennifer Kline ’13, Disability Rights Centre, Galway, IrelandSteven Toff ’14 International Trade Union Confederation, Brussels, Belgium

PHRGE Co-op Fellowships

PHRGE Fellow J.M. Kirby ’13 in Colombia.

PHRGE Fellow Co-op Reflections

In November, 2012 NLCHP Fellow Shelbey Wolf published her reflections about her time at NLCHP on the NLCHP Blog. A short excerpt is republished here.

For the last three months I’ve gotten to live in D.C. and work for the organization that inspired me to go to law school. Explaining what I’ve done at the Law Center is challenging. My main focus was on establishing housing as a human right in the United States, but it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around that. Even with a background in affordable housing and some exposure to inter-national law, it took lots of reading and listening and critical thinking to make it all click for me. We always talk about human rights as something other countries need to work on. After all, we’re the United States of America-we’re human rights heroes right?

No matter how patriotic you are, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the human right to housing has not been realized in the United States. And while no one is saying that the U.S. government has an obligation to hand out free houses to every American, the right to housing does require us to address the growing homelessness crisis.

We can’t solve this problem overnight, of course. But I hope we can all agree that, while we work to end homelessness and realize the right to housing in the long-term, we must at a minimum provide emergency shelter to those who need it. No man, woman or child should have to sleep on a park bench or a sidewalk. One small step at a time, we can make housing a right, not a privilege.

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PHRGE Fellow Jennifer Kline in Ireland

PHRGE Fellow Employers In 2012-2013, PHRGE sponsored five stipended fellowships that enabled students to design co-ops at human rights organizations in the United States and around the world. These student-created co-ops have been so successful that PHRGE will be offer-ing one “open” fellowship every quarter to support students interested in pursuing a co-op at a human rights organization of their choice. In addition, PHRGE will continue to offer co-op fellowships with our partnering employers:

Human Rights Law Network in New Delhi, India: HRLN is a collective of lawyers and social activists dedicated to the use of the legal system to advance human rights. HRLN provides pro bono legal services, conducts public interest litigation, engages in ad-vocacy, conducts legal awareness programs, investigates violations, publishes “know your rights” materials, and participates in campaigns. Students at HRLN work on the legal and social aspects of public interest initiatives, thereby allowing them to develop skills and an insight into how law and social activism, when combined, can achieve practical benefits for working people and the poor.

Maryland Legal Aid Bureau (MDLAB) in Baltimore, MD: MDLAB, a state-wide non-profit law firm providing quality legal services to low-income individuals, was the first legal services organization in the country to formally adopt a human rights framework. MDLAB incorporates human rights norms, language and strategies into its domestic work to help re-frame debates, advocate for holistic approaches and advance the recognition and protection of basic human rights. Students at MDLAB collaborate with the MDLAB Project Director to ensure a full integration of human rights meth-odologies into every aspect of work done at MDLAB, including litigation, trainings, community outreach materials, staff – client relationships and office systems.

The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) in Washington, DC: The mission of NLCHP is to serve as the legal arm of the nationwide movement to prevent and end homelessness. The organization pursues three main strategies: im-pact litigation, policy advocacy and public education; In doing so, it aims to address homelessness as a visible manifestation of a deeper, structural denial of human rights. Students work on NLCHP’s human rights projects, including working with local housing commissions to embrace a human right to housing, litigating human rights issues with local lawyers and raising U.S. homelessness and poverty issues in international fora.

Oxfam America in Boston, MA: Oxfam America is a leading international relief and development organization that creates lasting solutions to poverty, hunger, and injustice, and part of the 14-member Oxfam International consortium. To-gether with individuals and local groups in more than 90 countries, Oxfam America saves lives, helps people overcome poverty, and fights for social justice and human rights. Students work in the Private Sector Engagement Unit, which uses a human rights lens to affect corporate behavior.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in Cambridge, MA: Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) mobilizes health profession-als to advance health, dignity, and justice, and promotes the right to health for all. Students provide legal support to PHR’s Asy-lum Program Director by preparing briefing materials on torture under international hu-man rights law for presentations at medical schools, drafting articles on immigration de-tention and the right to health, and participating in investigations and policy work on the lack of adequate health care for immigration detainees.

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Project on the Vermont Workers’ Center “Health Care is a Human Right” Campaign

Ms. McGill has investigated and documented the Vermont Workers’ Center’s “Health Care is a Hu-man Right Campaign.” This four-year campaign achieved ground-breaking results in May 2011 when the Vermont Legislature adopted a bill that provides a framework for universal, sin-

gle-payer health care in Vermont based on human rights principles. The campaign continues to work to hold lawmak-

ers accountable to ensure the success of a universal health care system. McGill has published sev- eral articles for both domestic and international audiences on the grassroots movement for universal health care, as well as on the new Vermont health care law. In April, McGill presented her latest research at a Health and Human Rights Workshop sponsored by the Economic and Social Rights Working Group of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut.

Student Health and Human Rights Scholarship

Promoting student scholarship is an important goal for PHRGE. To that end, the PHRGE Health and Human Rights Program supported two stu-dent interns in the 2012-2013 year. LLM student Seda Akay Onur performed her co-op placement at PHRGE, providing research support in a number of areas. Onur also researched the extent to which the rights to health and edu-cation created an implied a right to electricity under interna-tional law, concluding that it is necessary to create a separate and explicit right to electricity to ensure the full realization of all ESC rights.

Frank Vitale was PHRGE’s Health and Human Rights JD intern for the spring quarter. Vitale researched the ongoing Vermont health care campaign, as well as the efficacy of a “social screening tool” that would enable health care practi-tioners to integrate questions about the social factors in their patient’s lives into rou-tine primary care protocols. Armed with this information, they might then be able to assist patients in addressing these social determinants of health. Vitale’s research was inspired by discussions at PHRGE’s 2012 Institute around the role health care practi-tioners can play in addressing the social determinants. Vitale wrote a short article on this topic that advocated for a mandatory social screening tool similar to the mandato-ry domestic violence screenings in many states.

Over the past year, PHRGE has identified Health and Human Rights as a priority theme for its work. PHRGE Associate Director Mariah McGill coordinates the program, which seeks to align research and other activities at NUSL with cutting-edge advocacy in the US health sector.

PHRGE Priority Theme: Health and Human Rights

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PHRGE unveiled its Health and Human Rights Program at the 2012 PHRGE Institute, “Human Rights and the Social Determinants of Health.” NUSL’s Health Policy and Law Program co-sponsored the two-day event, designed to explore ways in which the hu-man rights-based and public health advocacy communities in the U.S. could collab-orate more effectively to address health outcome disparities through action on the social determinants of health (SDOH).

The SDOH include access to nutritious food, early education, secure housing, clean wa-ter, adequate sanitation, decent work and universal health care. If these social condi-tions do, indeed, determine health care outcomes, then realizing other ESC rights will improve health outcomes. Integrating the rights and SDOH perspectives promises to empower activists in both areas.

The PHRGE Institute was designed to bring these two communities together to discuss advocacy approaches that might build on the strengths of the two disciplines.

Specifically, participants were encouraged to begin to develop strategies to address health outcome disparities that are prevalent in the United States. In doing so, partic-ipants looked at the wide-range of socio–economic factors that promote conditions for healthy lives.

2012 Annual Student Writing Competition Winner.

Each year PHRGE hosts an annual student writing competition open to JD students and recent graduates from U.S. law schools. The winner receives a cash prize and is invited to participate in the annual Institute. In 2012, Govind Persad, a JD/PHD Candidate in Philosophy at Stanford University won the competition with an article entitled “The Right to Health: From Maximization to Adequacy.” Mr. Persad received his $500 award at the 2012 PHRGE Institute.

Human Rights and the Social Determinants of Health

The PHRGE Institute began on No-vember 1st with a panel presen-tation and a keynote address by Dr. Ichiro Kawachi of the Harvard School of Public Health that were open to the public. The second day of the Institute provided an op-portunity for invited participants to delve more deeply into the in-tersection between the social de-terminants of health and human rights.

Over 150 people, including schol-ars, practitioners and students at-tended the public and private ses-sions of the Institute. As follow-up to the event, PHRGE staff member Mariah McGill is currently working on an article discussing the potential of rights-based approaches to address the SDOH and, thereby improve health outcomes. McGill has been invited to present a paper summarizing the Institute Proceedings at the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting in November 2013.

Ichiro Kawachi Anja Rudiger Patricia Illingworth George Annas Sofia Charvel

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Right to Education Program

In collaboration with the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI), PHRGE has been working on issues related to the right to education for several years. In the past year, this work has intensified with a focus on bringing a human rights perspective to key debates regarding education policy in the City of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

In 2013 a discussion on the school assignment policy in the Boston Public Schools (BPS) came to a close with a contro-

versial new policy voted on by the Boston School Committee. Through its connections to the BPS parents’ group, Quality Education

for Every Student (QUEST), PHRGE raised the question of whether or not the assign-ment changes under discussion and eventually approved recognized the right to equi-table access to quality education for all Boston schoolchildren. PHRGE hosted an April 2013 event at Northeastern University School of Law that brought together QUEST, the BPS, NESRI and a variety of other community organizations to discuss the challenges of rights-sensitive implementation of the new assignment plan.

In addition, PHRGE has commissioned research from student research interns to an-alyze the proposed expansion of charter schools in Massachusetts through the same human rights lens. Seen by many as the savior of the public education system, charter schools use public funds, but operate with relative autonomy from local school boards. Legislative proposals to remove current limitations on the growth of charters require analysis of how these publicly funded schools respond to the right of all children to quality education. PHRGE has published one Working Paper on charter school perfor-mance and the impact of “selection bias” on school effectiveness, and is working on another analyzing how the proposed legislative changes might impact the rights of students with special needs.

International Law and Large-Scale Land Acquisitions

Since the onset of the global financial crisis of the last decade and the paradoxical rise in the prices of primary materials, a new “Land Rush” has been underway in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Corporate and other interests have been acquiring land at un-precedented rates for agricultural and mining pursuits. These acquisitions (referred to by many as “land grabs”) very often have immediate and devastating impacts on the Right to Sustainable Livelihood of local communities that rely on acquired lands for their subsistence.

Communities and their allies have often resisted these acquisitions in multiple ways, both inside and outside of the courts. In some cases, human rights claims based on international law have been used to advance community rights, usually after domestic remedies have been exhausted. PHRGE is examining the long-term viability of these human rights strategies in the context of the emerging international approach to reg-ulating these acquisitions, and forming partnerships to align the Law School’s research and other resources with efforts to protect and advance community rights. This project also builds on our work on corporate social responsibility and legal ethics.

PHRGE Programs in Development

Annual Right to Education Panel

Each year, PHRGE hosts a panel discussion on the right to education. The panel provides an opportunity to analyze a trend in modern educa-tion through the lens of human rights. In 2013, Kevin Murray moderated a panel entitled “What Now? School Assign-ment and Quality in Boston Public Schools.” This panel dis-cussion featured a range of key actors in the debate discussing the difficulty of equitable as-signment in a grossly unequal system such as Boston’s. NESRI’s Liz Sullivan, brought a human rights perspective to the dis-cussion, which was attended by many parents of Boston school children.

Journeys & Distances mural by OTHER Arab Artists Collective, Detroit. Artists: Radfan Alqirsh, Mohamad Bazzi, Imad Hassan, Joe Namy. www.otherart.org

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International Law and the Right to Water and Sanitation

In May 2012, PHRGE Affiliated Faculty Professor Lee Breckenridge and PHRGE Faculty Co-Director Martha Davis initiated a year-long collaboration with the Northeastern University Departments of Engineering and Architecture addressing the human rights

effects of certain technical in-novations in the area of water purification. The project used human right principles to cre-ate an innovative framework for evaluating urban water and wastewater systems. In em-ploying this framework, PHRGE Associate Director Mariah McGill examined relevant U.S. consti-tutional, legislative and judicial requirements through a human

rights lens. The key outcome of the work was a summary of key factors to consider in examining the extent to which currently available assessment tools can facilitate com-pliance with human rights norms relating to access to water and sanitation.

The team’s work has resulted in a number of articles and presentations. The team draft-ed a literature review on emerging international human rights to water and sanitation. Mariah McGill has completed a draft article “Addressing Human Rights to Water and Sanitation in the Context of Environmental Life Cycle Assessments.”

In February, Dr. April Z. Gu, of the Northeastern School of Engineering and a co-Prin-cipal Investigator for the project delivered a talk entitled “Water Sustainability at the Interplay of Technology, Regulation and Human Rights” for the America Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in Boston. Also in February, Professor Lee Breckenridge of PHRGE served on a panel “The Price of Water: Right vs. Commodity,” at the Boston+Acumen Chapter Event. The panel discussion included consideration of relationships between technological innovation, allocation of property rights, and human rights to water.

PHRGE Projects

The right to water project has also provided opportunities for student scholarship. In the Spring 2012 quarter, JD student Melanie Medalle conducted research on various environmental and social life cycle assessment methodologies and their limitations in measuring human rights compliance. Medalle also considered the best ways to resolve competing human rights principles in the context of water and sanitation issues.

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Bringing International Human Rights Law into Domestic Forums

Over the past several years, PHRGE has en-gaged in numerous projects to implement in-ternational human rights norms in the United States. These projects have included trainings on human rights for advocates, judges and legislators, amicus briefs asserting human rights norms in domestic cases and training materials for litigators.

This year PHRGE has focused on training state and federal court judges on the applicability of international human rights law in domestic cases. To this end, PHRGE Faculty Co-Director

Martha Davis has assisted the American Bar Association and NUSL alumnus, John Pol-lock, in the creation of judicial handbook on the right to civil counsel, including an appendix on the right to counsel in international law. The judicial handbook will be released in early 2014.

Professor Davis also participated in a number of judicial education initiatives focused on international human rights law. In October, Professor Davis delivered remarks on the domestic importance of human rights law at a plenary panel at the annual conference for the National Association of Women Judges in Miami, Florida. In March, Professor Davis provided an overview of international human rights in domestic litigation and advocacy under the auspices of the Judicial Institute of Maryland in Annapolis. In April, Professor Davis presented remarks entitled “Race and the Right to Counsel Under Inter-national Law” to an audience of judges and court administrators at the National Consor-tium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts in Washington, D.C.

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NATIONAL CONSORTIUM ON RACIAL AND ETHNIC FAIRNESS IN THE COURTS

25th Annual Conference

Marriott at Metro Center

Washington, District of Columbia

PHRGE Projects

PHRGE Human Rights Conferences

In April 2013, PHRGE co-sponsored two conferences that addressed using human rights in domestic advocacy. The first, held at Washington College of Law, was entitled “Human Rights Lawyering at the State and Local Level in the United States.” It assem-bled legal aid attorneys and juvenile public defenders to discuss approaches to incor-porating human rights more fully into their work. Professor Martha Davis provided opening remarks.

Similarly, “Bringing Economic and Social Human Rights Home: the Right to Ade-quate Housing in the United States” en-gaged 150 attorneys, advocates and federal, state and local government representa-tives in a discussion of the impact of the human rights perspective in strengthening advocacy on behalf of homeless and poor Americans. Professor Davis participated in a panel discussion that explored the connection between the right to housing and oth-er human rights, and PHRGE Faculty Co-Director Professor Lucy Williams spoke to the implications of a series of South African legal decisions related to the right to housing.

Al-Janko v. Gates Amicus Brief

In January 2013, a PHRGE team consisting of Professor Davis, Greg Dorchak and An-drew Kirtley filed an amicus brief on behalf of scholars of international law and state law in al-Janko v. Gates, pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The case arises from the U.S. government’s treatment of Abd Al-Rahim Rassak al-Janko, a Syrian Kurd who was taken by U.S. forces from a Taliban prison, only to be accused as an al Qaeda collaborator and confined at Guantanamo Bay for seven years. Al-Janko was cleared of all charges and released to Belgium in 2009.

Following his release, al-Janko initiated a civil suit for damages against the United States claiming physical and emotional injuries resulting from “abusive interrogation techniques” used at Guantanamo. Among other things, the complaint alleges that the United States transgressed the law of nations in violation of the federal Alien Tort Statute (ATS). Attorney Paul Hoffman, an expert on the ATS, is representing al-Janko.

At issue in the case is whether the law of the District of Columbia incorporates the law of nations, and recognizes such violations as torture. PHRGE’s involvement stems directly from our recognized expertise on the domestic, subnational incorporation of human rights law in the U.S. Under Professor Davis’s supervision, Dorchak and Kirt-ley researched the origins of D.C. law – some borrowed from Maryland – ultimately establishing that the District has incorporated the law of nations since its inception and continues to recognize its role. A host of prominent scholars participated as indi-vidual amicus curiae on the brief, arguing that because of the District’s recognition of the law of nations, al-Janko’s ATS claim could not be summarily dismissed.

Cathy Albisa, Martha Davis, Philip Alston

Martha Davis

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PHRGE Affiliated Projects

iSERP Bellagio Conference

In 2012 Professors Williams and Klare received a grant from the Rockefeller Foun-dation to hold a conference at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center in Italy in March 2013 to finalize the chapters for a book entitled “Social and Economic Rights in Theory and Practice: A Critical Assessment” which will be published in early

2014. In addition to dis-cussing the issues raised by their collective prod-uct, participants interact-ed with Bellagio Fellows in residence at the Center, including Justice Edwin Cameron of South Africa’s Constitutional Court.

The International Social and Economic Rights Project (iSERP)

The International Social and Economic Rights Project (iSERP) is a PHRGE-affiliated net-work of lawyers, judges, human rights advocates, and academics focused on research related to social and economic rights (SER). Professors Lucy Williams and Karl Klare con-vene the network, which works on the premise that enacting, implementing, and en-forcing SER can play a significant role in making our societies more equal, just, inclusive, and caring and in fostering human dignity and self-realization.

Over the long run, members of the network hope to assist practitioners and activists attempting to justify, secure, and enforce SER. They aspire to develop new legal ideas and theories supportive of SER approaches. They have particularly focused on modern-izing the theory of separation-of-powers, democratic theory, and the proper scope of judicial review, devising sophisticated remedies for SER cases, facilitating grassroots and community participation in the legal process, and examining the impact of SER and transformative constitutions on questions of private law, economic democracy, and economic development.

iSERP organizes annual international workshops to share and interrogate grassroots ex-perience, legal developments, and legal theory relative to SER. Thus far, iSERP has held annual workshops at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, USA (2009), the Faculty of Law, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia (2010), the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, South Africa (2011) and the University College of London in the United Kingdom (2012). The next workshop will be held in Delhi, India in early 2014.

Karl Klare and Lucy Williams

iSERP Working Group

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The Due Diligence Project

The Due Diligence Project is a multi-country, multi-year study on creating standards and indicators on State accountability to end violence against women (VAW). It seeks to add content and clarity to the state obligations to prevent, protect, prose-cute, punish and provide redress to acts of VAW. Several inputs inform this study including literature reviews, questionnaires, global expert group meetings, and regional consultative meet-

ings in the six regions of the world. Outputs are six regional reports and one global comprehensive report (forthcoming).

Over the past year, Project Directors Zarizana Aziz and Janine Moussa worked closely with regional consultants and experts to compile data and draft the six regional re-ports, detailing and comprising the data compiled to date including the 300 responses from respondents to the questionnaire from over 40 countries worldwide.

The Due Diligence Project also held five two-day regional expert consultations to dis-cuss State actions, implementation strategies as well as good practices for eliminating violence against women. These regional meetings were held in Malaysia, Lebanon, South Africa, Costa Rica and the Bahamas. Each of these meetings was co-hosted by local Due Diligence Project program partners. The discussions and outcomes of these meetings were incorporated into the regional reports.

Project Directors also presented preliminary findings at side-events at several in-ter-govermental forums, organized by the Due Diligence Project and sponsored by governments. In October 2012 the Project Directors presented their findings and dis-cussed State responsibility on VAW, focusing on protection of women from violence against women at a side event in conjunction with the UN General Assembly in New York. In March 2013, the Project presented at the 57th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Most recently, in May 2013, Project Directors participated in three panels at the 23rd session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva on: 1) violence against women and the UPR process; 2) violence against women and peace and tradi-tional values; and 3) culture, religion and violence against women.

PHRGE Affiliated Projects

Finally during this period, Project Directors began the process of compiling all the data into one global comprehensive report which they hope to disseminate by the fall of 2013.Throughout this period, the Due Diligence Project worked with NUSL students as work study and co-op students, inviting a few of them to attend some of these events at the United Nations.

As the first phase of the Due Diligence Project comes to a close in 2013, Project Di-rectors are preparing for the Due Diligence Project Phase II (2013–2016) which will focus on the instrumentalization and implementation of the global findings, targeted at specific stakeholder groups, in select countries around the world. The Due Diligence Project is co-sponsoring PHRGE’s 2013 annual Institute on ESC Rights which will ex-plore “State Obligations and Violence Against Women.”

Faculty Co-Directors

Martha Davis“Equality, Participation and the Civil Right to Counsel: Lessons from Domestic and In-ternational Law,” Yale Law Journal (2013).

“Shadow and Substance: The Impacts of the Anti-International Law Debate on State Court Judges,” New England Law Review (2013).

“A Strong Need for Civil Legal Assistance,” The National Law Journal, (2013).

“Introduction, Framing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for Action,” 4 Northeastern University Law Journal 315 (2012).

“A Human Rights Based Approach to Food Security,” 45 Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy 202 (2012), co-authored by Angela Duger.

PHRGE Publications

“Occupy Wall Street and International Human Rights,” 39 Fordham Urban Law Journal 101 (2012).

“The Supreme Court Healthcare Reform Ruling: Panel Verdict,” The Guardian, (June 2012).

Professor Lucy A. Williams“The Legal Construction of Poverty: Gender ‘Work’ and the ‘Social Contract,’” in Law and Poverty: Perspectives from South Africa and Beyond, Sandra Liebenberg & Geo Quinot, eds., (2012).

Professor Margaret Y.K. Woo“Bounded Legality: China’s Developmental State and Civil Dispute Resolution,” 27 Maryland Journal of International Law 235 (2012).

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“China’s Civil Justice System: Legal Reforms in the Global Economy,” in Handbook on China’s Governance and Domestic Politics, Christopher Ogden, ed., (Routledge, 2012).

PHRGE Staff

Assistant Director Mariah McGill“Economic and Social Rights in the United States: Implementation Without Ratifica-tion,” 4 Northeastern University Law Journal 365 (2012), co-authored by Gillian Mac-Naughton.

“Addressing Human Rights to Water and Sanitation in the Context of Environmental Life Cycle Assessments,” (Forthcoming 2013).

“Rights-Based Organizing as an Upstream Public Health Intervention” (Forthcoming 2013).

Ford Foundation Fellow Angela Duger“A Human Rights-Based Approach to Food Security,” Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy (September/October 2012), co-authored by Martha Davis.

“Using the Boston Principles: Fighting for the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of Noncitizens,” Poverty and Race Research Action Council Newsletter (2012).

PHRGE Affiliated Scholars

Visiting Scholar Zarizana Aziz“Culture, Power and Narratives in Domestic Violence” in Maznah Mohamad & Saskia E. Wieringa, eds., Family Ambiguity and Domestic Violence in Asia: Concept, Law and Process (Sussex University Press 2013).

“Renewing Faith: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Islam,” Identity Culture and Poli-tics, CODESRIA (Forthcoming 2013).

Affiliated Scholar Kyle CourtneyInternational Human Rights: Research and Process (Carolina Academic Press 2013).

Senior Fellow Gillian MacNaughton“Beyond a Minimum Threshold: The Right to Social Equality,” in Lanse Minkler, ed., The State of Economic and Social Human Rights (Cambridge University Press 2012).

PHRGE Publications

SSRN eJournal “Human Rights and the Global Economy”

There are currently 4,479 papers posted in PHRGE’s ejournal “Human Rights and the Global Economy” co-edited by Professors Rashmi Dyal-Chand, Hope Lewis and Wendy Parmet and published by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). The total number of downloads for these papers is 631,475.

“Economic and Social Rights in the United States: Implementation Without Ratifica-tion,” 4 Northeastern University Law Journal 365 (2012), co-authored by Mariah McGill.

PHRGE Affiliated Faculty Professor Aziza Ahmed“Boston Bombings Test Strength of New Muslim Role in American Society,” The Nation-al (April 2013).

“No Way Out: The Dual Subordination of Muslim Women in Indian Legal Culture,” in Self-Determination and Women’s Rights in Muslim Societies, Chitra Raghavan & James P. Levine, eds., (Brandeis University Press 2012).

“When Men Are Harmed: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Torture at Abu Ghraib,” 11 Uni-versity of California Los Angeles Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law 1 (2012).

Professor Brook Baker“Training Policy-Makers, Advocates and Activists for Social Justice in Medicine: An Overview of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Intellectual Property and Access to Med-icines Short Course,” (Submitted for publication 2012), co-authored by Yousuf Vawda.

“India Patent Law in a Vise: Hydraulic Pressure from the EU, US and Novartis,” (Submit-ted for publication 2012).

“Improving Access to Medicines in Least Developed Countries: An Argument for Exten-sion of the LDC TRIP’s Transition Period to Support Local Production,” (Submitted for publication 2012), co-authored by Katherine Knapp & Jen Cohn.

“Public Interest Analysis of US TPP Proposal for an IP Chapter,” American University In-ternational Law Review (Forthcoming 2012), co-authored by Sean Flynn and Margot Kaminski.

“Settlement of India/EU WTO Dispute re Seizures of In-Transit Medicines: Why the Pro-posed EU Border Regulation Isn’t Good Enough,” Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property Research Paper Series (2012).

Professor Leo Beletsky“Policy Reform to Shift the Health and Human Rights Environment for Vulnerable Groups: The Case of Kyrgyzstan’s Instruction,” 417 Health and Human Rights Journal 14(2) e1-e15 (2012), et. al.

Rashmi Dyal-Chand Hope Lewis Wendy Parmet

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Professor Wendy Parmet“Beyond Externships: Health Law Co-ops,” 9 Indiana Health Law Review 401 (2012).

“Solidarity for Global Health,” 26 Bioethics 7 (2012), co-authored by Patricia Illingworth.

“Restoring Legal Immigrants’ State Health Insurance – The Finch Case,” 7 Boston Health Law Reporter 6 (2012), co-authored by Lorianne Sainsbury-Wong.

Professor Sonia Rolland“Considering Development in the Implementation of Panel and AB Reports,” 4 Trade, Law and Development 150 (2012).

“Les principes généraux à l’OMC” in L’Organisation Mondiale Du Commerce Et Les Sources De Droit, Thierry Garcia & Vincent Tomkiewics, eds., (2012).

Professor Rachel Rosenbloom“Policing the Borders of Birthright Citizenship: Some Thoughts on the New (and Old) Restrictionism,” 51 Washburn Law Journal 311 (2012).

In 2010, PHRGE established the New England Regional Faculty Colloquia Series. Each quarter PHRGE invites a scholar working in New England to present recent research to a regional group of faculty invitees. The luncheon series focuses on human rights scholarship, particularly in the area of ESCR, and welcomes speakers from legal as well as interdisciplinary perspectives.

Sharmila Murthy, Joint Fellow in the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation Pro-gram at the Harvard University Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the Sustainability Science Program at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government presented a paper entitled “The Human Right to Water and Sanitation and the Controversy over Privatization” based on her forthcoming article. Professor Lee Breckenridge offered comments on Ms. Murthy’s presentation and then opened the session for a robust group discussion.

Journal Launch

In February 2013, PHRGE and the Northeastern Uni-versity Law Journal gathered to celebrate the release of a special issue of the NULJ entitled “Framing Eco-nomic and Cultural Rights for Mobilization and Ad-vocacy: Towards a Strategic Agenda.” The issue was the primary output of the 2012 ESCR Institute of the same name, and featured articles written by Institute participants and PHRGE faculty and staff.

PHRGE Newsletter and Fellow Blog

PHRGE has successfully launched a new electronic newsletter known as “Openings.” The monthly news-letter highlights human rights work done by PHRGE faculty and staff and important domestic and inter-national human rights developments. PHRGE has also launched a new blog entitled “Fellow Talk” which pro-vides a forum for current and former PHRGE Fellows.

“Syringe Confiscation as an HIV Risk Factor: the Public Health Implications of Arbitrary Policing in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico,” Journal of Urban Health (2012), co-au-thored by R. Lozada, T. Gaines, et. al.

“Harmonizing disease prevention and police practice in the implementation of HIV prevention programs: Up-stream strategies from Wilmington,” Harm Reduction Jour-nal (2012), co-authored by B. Siverman, C. Davis, J. Graff, J. Bhatti, M. Santos.

“Mexico’s Northern Border Conflict: Collateral Damage to Health and Human Rights of Vulnerable Groups,” Pan-American Journal of Public Health (2012), co-authored by G. Martinez, T. Gaines, et al.

Professor Richard Daynard“Stubbing Out Cigarettes for Good,” The New York Times, (March 2013).

Professor Hope Lewis“Forgotten Sisters – A Report on Violence Against Women with Disabilities: An Over-view of its Nature, Scope, Causes and Consequences,” Northeastern University School of Law Research Paper No. 104-2012 (2012), co-authored by Stephanie Ortoleva.

Dr. Serena Parekh, Assistant Professor in the Northeastern University Philosophy Department presented a paper enti-tled “From Bare Life to Agency: On the Ontological Depri-vation of Statelessness,” with comments by Professor Dan Danielsen.

Professor Frank J. Garcia of Boston College Law School presented a talk entitled “Global Justice: Three Takes” based on his book “Global Jus-tice and International Economic Law: Three Takes.” Professor Margaret Woo offered comments on Professor Garcia’s pre-sentation.

PHRGE New England Regional Faculty Colloquia

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PHRGE Faculty Notes

Professor Martha F. Davis Professor Davis presented her work on domestic law and international human rights in several forums. In July, she served as a panelist on a na-tional webinar on the human rights implications of United States Supreme Court decisions spon-sored by Washington College of Law at American University. In October, she appeared on a panel on human rights and domestic advocacy at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s annual substan-tive law conference at Virginia’s Airlie Center. In

November she gave a presentation on the Boston Principles on the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of Noncitizens to the Newton, MA Human Rights Commission and served as a panelist at the Crisis in the Courts Symposium sponsored by New England Law Review. In May, Professor Davis travelled to Lund University in Lund, Sweden to deliver two comparative talks on access and participation in civil justice five decades after the landmark Gideon v. Wainwright decision.

Professor Davis has authored a number of articles and blog posts over the past year. Four of Davis’ papers were listed on nine SSRN top ten lists of most downloaded articles in their respective journals. Additionally, in June 2012 Professor Davis served on an online legal opinion panel for The Guardian and offered her perspective and analysis of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In March 2013, Professor Davis wrote an opinion editorial advocating for civil legal assistance in the National Law Journal.

Professor Davis served on the advisory board for a project with the American Universi-ty, Washington School of Law, Center for Humanitarian and Human Rights to integrate human rights into the daily work of legal services lawyers. She served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. Professor Davis also provided technical assistance to human rights practitioners and scholars, includ-ing the authors of a new poverty law casebook seeking to incorporate human rights material.

Professor Dan DanielsenProfessor Danielsen continues to serve as the Faculty Director of Northeastern’s new LLM and International Programs. Danielsen has been in-volved in several conferences and other events centered on issues of the Global Economy. He served as Core Faculty and Stream Leader for the “Corporation and Global Society,” Institute for Global Law and Policy Summer Workshop at Harvard Law School in June 2012 and at HBK Uni-versity in Doha, Qatar in January 2013. In March, he served as the Keynote Speaker and Faculty

Participant at the Technologies of Imperialism: Law in Contemporary and Historical Perspective Conference in London, UK where he delivered a talk entitled “Corporate Power, Instrumental States and Imperialism: Some Critical Reflections.”. In June, he will serve as a panelist and panel organizer for the Corporations and Global Society Panel at the Institute for Global Law and Policy conference at Harvard Law School.

Professor Lucy A. WilliamsProfessor Williams is a Co-Convener of iSERP and a Faculty Co-Director of PHRGE. She initiated the ESCR-NET project in which she submits summa-ries of SER cases from around the globe to be included in the ESCR-NET database. Professor Williams has also produced multiple publica-tions and has convened various workshops and seminars on human rights. In March, Professor Williams convened a workshop of iSERP authors at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in

Italy which entailed the review and analysis of draft chapters for a book tentatively entitled, “Social and Economic Rights in Theory and Practice: A Critical Assessment.” The book has been accepted for publication by Routledge. In February 2013, Professor Williams presented remarks comparing the enforcement of ESC rights in Germany and South Africa on a panel entitled “Enforcement of Rights- Learning from Comparative Experiences in Europe and Israel.” This panel discussion was part of the “Legal Re-sources Centre and the Courts in South Africa: Realizing Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights through Litigation” conference hosted by the Southern Africa Legal Services Foundation, Inc., at the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In June 2012, Professor Williams convened iSERP’s Fourth Workshop on Social and Economic Rights, Co-Sponsored by the University College London, London, UK and PHRGE, at University College London. This conference was attended by members from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, India, Ireland, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

Professor Margaret Y. K. WooProfessor Woo continues to serve as a reviewer for the Fulbright Specialists Program for the Council for International Exchange of Scholars due to her expertise in this area. Professor Woo was the panel chair and discussant for the pan-el “Dispute Resolution in China” at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting held in Ha-waii in June 2012. In September, Professor Woo prepared and presented a country report for China’s latest development in civil procedure for the International Association of Procedural Law,

whose annual meeting was held at the University of Moscow. In October, she was in-vited to and attended a special symposium on “The Future of Chinese Administrative Law” hosted by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of

PHRGE Faculty Co-Directors

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Pennsylvania Law School. Also in October, Professor Woo presented at NUSL’s Inaugural National Symposium on Experiential Education in Law. Professor Woo has been invited to serve on the Advisory Board of a new Chinese and comparative law series published in the Netherlands by BRILL| Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

PHRGE Affiliated Scholars

Visiting Scholar Zarizana Aziz, Zarizana Aziz participated in a number of forums, during the time period covered by this report in conjunction with her role as co-Director of the Due Diligence Project (DDP). Aziz presented on the Project and its findings at several of the Due Diligence Project’s regional expert meetings held during this time, namely: 1) Asia Pacific consulta-tion, held in Malaysia, September 2012 ; 2) Mid-dle East North Africa (MENA) consultation, held in Lebanon, September 2012; and 3) African con-sultation, held in South Africa, December 2012.

Aziz also presented at several high level side events held in conjunction with inter-gov-ernmental forums, such as the side event organized by the DDP on “Protecting Women from Violence: Bridging Policy and Practice” held in conjunction with the United Na-tions General Assembly in October 2012; the side event organized by the DDP entitled “Due Diligence from the Ground Up: State Compliance to End Violence against Women” held in conjunction with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in March 2013; and a panel at the United Nations Human Rights Council in May 2013 on “Tradition values, culture, religion and women’s human rights.”

Aziz further conducted a workshop on amicus briefs in Malaysia in August 2012 and a feminist leadership and women’s political participation training in Cairo in January 2013. Aziz currently serves as a consultant to draft gender equality legislation in the Maldives.

Visiting Scholar Maria Green Visiting Scholar Maria Green spent the academic year in the 2012-2013 Fulbright Lund Distin-guished Chair in International Human Rights, based at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Lund, Sweden. In the Fulbright chair, Maria continued with her ongoing work in human rights and de-velopment; connected with new human rights colleagues at the Wallenberg Institute and else-

where; and taught in the Lund University law school, where among other things she taught a new course on the Right to Development in the Masters’ Program in Interna-tional Human Rights Law. In April Maria delivered the Third Annual Avril MacDonald Lecture, titled “Charting New Paths: International Human Rights Law and Internation-al Development,” at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

PHRGE Senior Fellow Gillian MacNaughtonDr. Gillian MacNaughton continues to research, write and present on economic and social rights, and on human rights-based indicators and im-pact assessment. In September 2012, Dr. Mac-Naughton presented on the plenary panel at the “Joint World Bank - UN Seminar on Human Rights Impact Assessment and Other Forms of Analysis in Development Policy and Operations” at The World Bank in Washington DC. Later that after-noon, she spoke about mainstreaming human rights into other forms of impact assessment at

the workshop on the right to health. In January 2013, Dr. MacNaughton presented “Health, Human Rights and Impact Assessment” for faculty, students and staff affil-iated with the Community Health Program at Tufts University in Medford, MA, and in April , a paper entitled “Human Rights Impact Assessment – A Method for Healthy Policy Making” at a workshop on “Health and Human Rights: Social Mobilization, Law and Policy” held by the Economic and Social Rights Research Group of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. In May , she presented her paper, “Hu-man Rights Education for All: A Proposal for the Post-2015 International Development Agenda” at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Boston.

In July 2012, Dr. MacNaughton discussed “The Right to Health and Human Rights-Based Health Indicators: Three Case Studies” with students in the Master of Studies Program in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford, UK. In the same vein, in October, she presented “Using Indicators to Measure the Progressive Re-alization of the Right to Health” in Professor Aziza Ahmed’s class, “International Health Law” at NUSL. In February 2013, Dr. MacNaughton spoke about the article she co-au-thored with PHRGE Assistant Director Mariah McGill, “Economic and Social Rights in the United States: Implementation without Ratification” at the Launch of the Special Issue of the Northeastern University Law Journal on “Framing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for Mobilization and Advocacy : Towards a Strategic Agenda in the Unit-ed States.”

From September 2012 to January 2013, Dr. MacNaughton worked with Ms. Angela Duger ’11 and economist Dr. Catherine Porter at the University of Oxford on a UNICEF project to develop human rights-based indicators for the organization’s next multi-year global strategic plan, as well as for country level programming. Dr. MacNaughton also continued to teach courses on human rights-based approaches to development policy and practice at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in the fall of 2012 and the spring of 2013, and returned in March 2013 to the University of Sarajevo for the third year to teach in the cluster on economic and social rights in the European Regional Master’s Program in Human Rights and Democ-ratization.

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PHRGE Affiliated Faculty

Professor Roger I. AbramsProfessor Abrams continued to serve as a neutral arbitrator, appointed to hear labor disputes between management and unions involving the rights of American workers. Collective bargaining agreements negotiated across the economy normally contain arbi-tration procedures as an alternative dispute resolution system. The parties to those agree-ments select neutrals to conduct hearings,

often held on plant premises, to accumulate testimony and documents concerning industrial disputes ranging from the denial of overtime pay to a discharged employee’s right to return to work under the “just cause” standard.

Over the past year, Professor Abrams has heard disputes in the Boston metropolitan area and cases in Baltimore, the Florida Panhandle, South Florida, and the Mississippi Delta. Each case was different, but a majority of the disputes involved employees who were discharged. In most of the cases, the parties were represented by attorneys. In some, the union was represented by an international field representative and man-agement by the director of human resources. Employees participated in the hearings as witnesses speaking on their own behalf.

Professor Aziza AhmedProfessor Aziza Ahmed has been involved in sup-porting a range of human rights projects and ac-tivities this past year. Continuing her work on the intersection of criminal laws and public health, Professor Ahmed has teamed up with the Sex Worker Project of the Urban Justice Center to ex-amine laws that further marginalize sex workers in the context of the HIV epidemic. She has also just completed a project drawing upon archival research on gender advocacy in international human rights law in the context of HIV. Professor

Ahmed will be hosting a Ford Foundation funded meeting this year (co-sponsored by PHRGE) examining the role of legal advocacy and litigation in addressing issues per-taining to Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and HIV. Professor Ahmed has completed several presentations on issues related to human rights including at the American Bar Association. She has presented her academic work in a variety of fora including Harvard Law School, the Department of History for the State University of New York Binghamton, Western New England School of Law, and the Widener University School of Law. She appeared on MSNBC to discuss the after-math of the Boston marathon bombings on the Muslim community. Professor Ahmed continues her work as a board member of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States as well as the Center for Health and Gender Equity. She is also a member of the Anti-Trafficking Roundtable hosted by American University Washington College of Law and Harvard Law School.

Professor Brook BakerFor the past year Professor Brook Baker has con-tinued human-rights related work as a policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project) and as an international consultant on intellec-tual property and access to medicine. In July, he attended and presented at the International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC, on several access to medicines issues. In August, he concluded his in-country Ugandan consultation sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme on pro-access law reform to Uganda’s proposed In-

dustrial Property Bill. In September, he traveled to the Leesburg, Virginia round of ne-gotiation on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and presented a critical analysis on the impact of a proposed investment clause and investor-state dispute resolution on access to medicines.

Starting in the fall, Professor Baker has been working with an international coalition of activists, who have been advocating for an extension of the time period within which least developed countries must become compliant with international IP law (the WTO TRIPS Agreement) and with an Africa coalition opposing the formation of an Africa In-tellectual Property Office. In November, he co-taught a two-week intensive course on IP and Access to Medicines at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa. In November, while in South Africa, he also presented an analysis at an informal meet-ing with the Medicines Patent Pool on essential terms and conditions for voluntary li-censes. Since then he has written analyses on IP-grantback rights in voluntary licenses and on a February voluntary license to the Medicines Patent Pool from ViiV Healthcare with respect to one of its pediatric AIDS medicines. In March, he attended an informal consultation for UNITAID in Geneva focusing on its IP-related advocacy strategies. In March, he also attended a conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he chaired sessions and gave a plenary talk on Debunking IP-for-Development.

More locally, Professor Baker has presented on several IP and access to medicines relat-ed issues at conferences and events at George Washington School of Law, Northeastern University, New England School of Law, NU School of Law, Boston College, and Partners in Health. Along with Aziza Ahmed and Leo Beletsky, NUSL colleagues, Professor Baker has been involved in an NU series of interdisciplinary Grand Rounds on HIV Prevention Policy sponsored by the law school’s new Health Policy and Law Project.

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Professor Leo Beletsky Over the last year, Professor Beletsky has continued to conduct research on the public health implications of drug law reforms in the Northern Border Region of Mexico, with a spe-cial focus on drug user and sex work-er populations. This NIH-sponsored project is a bi-national collaboration

with UCSD School of Medicine and several Mexican civil society organizations. He has also contributed to research at the intersection of HIV prevention and human rights in Russia with colleagues from Yale School of Public Health. As part of his ongoing consultancy with the Open Society Foundations, he has also continued to advise on the implementation of programs designed to document and prevent police abuse of marginalized groups in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. For the Law and Health Initia-tive at Open Society Foundations, he is working on a report on the legacy of totalitarian regimes in patient rights regulatory frameworks of post-Communist states in Central and Eastern Europe. On the domestic front, Professor Beletsky just wrapped up an Open Society Foundations-sponsored project to align policing and public health activ-ities targeting at-risk drug users in Baltimore, MD in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore City Department of Health. He traveled to Vienna, Austria to conduct human rights advocacy during the 2012 meeting of the International Nar-cotics Control Board and to Sydney and Melbourne, Australia to participate in interna-tional discussions on policing reform.

Professor Hope LewisHope Lewis, Professor of Law and Chair of the law school’s Global Law Committee, is a co-editor of PHRGE’s SSRN eJournal Human Rights & the Glob-al Economy. She teaches courses in International Law, International Human Rights and the Global Economy, and a Seminar on Human Rights: Race, Gender, and Culture. During 2012, she was partic-ularly active in efforts to promote and implement the human rights of women with disabilities globally. As Founding Co-chair of the Internation-al Disability Rights Interest Group of the Ameri-

can Society of International Law (ASIL), she co-organized a panel on violence against women with disabilities for ASIL’s 106th Annual Meeting. She worked with other legal academics, activists, and students to produce an influential 229-page report on vio-lence against women with disabilities. The Report was favorably cited in statements by the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women (SRVAW), UN Enable, UN Women, and by an Assistant-Secretary-General. On the same subject, Professor Lewis moderated and co-organized a high-level side event at the UN headquarters, “Prevent-ing and Ending Violence against Women with Disabilities” which discussed the release by the SRVAW of a report on “Violence against Women with Disabilities” to the General Assembly.

In October 2012, Professor Lewis brought disability issues into mainstream discourse through her panel presentation, “Intersectionality and Disability: Human Rights in the Law School Classroom,” at the Society of American Law Teachers Annual Teaching Con-

ference, University of Maryland School of Law, Baltimore, MD. She is also an active on-line commentator. Representative posts in 2012 include: “Teaching International Law while Confronting Current Events—Balancing Past and Present” and “Forgotten Sisters: Violence Against Women with Disabilities, Human Rights, and Complex Identi-ty Status.” In 2012, Professor Lewis was honored for her mentoring of colleagues and students in human rights and other aspects of international law as the recipient of the American Bar Association Section of International Law Mayre Rasmussen Award for Mentoring Women in International Law.

Professor Susan Maze-RothsteinAssociate Academic Specialist Susan Maze-Rothstein, continues to lead the first year community social jus-tice program, Legal Skills in Social Context (LSSC) and is the faculty advisor to the NUSL chapter of the Black Law Students Association. In 2012-2013, the LSSC program com-

pleted its first ever project serving an international client organization, Center for the Protection of Rights for Disadvantaged Citizens (CRPDC) at Wuhan University School of Law in China. Professor Maze-Rothstein and students worked with CRPDC in an effort to close the gap in protective rights of persons with physical disabilities created by China’s reliance on privatization to meet the needs of its people. While China is a sig-natory to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and has regulations at the provincial level that protect the rights of disabled, there are no agencies in China that handle discrimination claims based on disability and there is no readily available information about the rights that persons living with physical disabilities have.

Under the capable supervision of Professor Maze-Rothstein, first year students com-pleted this project in three parts. In the first, students performed comparative research on how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the CRPD were established, including cultural and historical contexts surrounding both movements. Students also researched the differences in reasonable accommodations standards in both sets of legislation. Finally, the students also used the United States and Australia to demonstrate implementation strategies and shortcomings of the ADA and the CRPD respectively. The final work product identified the best practices for the CPRD to use in creating a disability rights agenda that will protect the rights of persons with physi-cal disabilities in the workplace in China through reasonable accommodations for the physically disabled worker.

Professor Michael MeltsnerProfessor Michael Meltsner centered his human rights related work during the last year on preparing the per-formances of his play, In Our Name: A Play of the Torture Years, which confronts government rationaliza-tions, bizarre military hearings, and the willful blindness of the public to

what happens behind barbed wire. Professor Meltsner states, “Americans have not ful-ly confronted that what we did at Guantanamo and elsewhere tainted our reputation,

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PHRGE Senior Fellow Gillian MacNaughton was the lead consultant on a UNICEF project

from September 2012 to January 2013. The aim of the project was to develop indi-

cators to measure the realization of human rights covering all UNICEF program areas

– including nutrition, health, HIV/AIDS, education, water and sanitation, child protec-

tion and early childhood development – taking into account both development and

emergency contexts. Further, the project required development of indicators specific

to three levels: 1) the programs at the country level, 2) the 2014-2017 mid-term stra-

tegic plan at the organizational level, and 3) the post-2015 international development

agenda at the global level. Dr. MacNaughton worked on this project with Ms. Angela

Duger ’11 and economist Dr. Catherine Porter at the University of Oxford, as well as

UNICEF human rights staff in the Gender, Rights and Civic Engagement Unit.

As part of the United Nations system, UNICEF is guided by the United Nations Charter

and is therefore responsible, along with all other UN entities, for the realization of hu-

man rights. The UNICEF mission statement establishes that the organization is guided

in particular by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the goal of UNICEF’s work is

the realization of children’s rights, and UNICEF is committed to ensuring special protec-

tion for the most disadvantaged children. As a result of this focus, UNICEF has engaged

over the past two decades in implementing a human rights-based approach to all its

work. The human rights indicators project took the organization one step further in its

commitment to realizing human rights, particularly children’s rights.

MacNaughton, Duger and Porter discovered that

it was impractical to recommend specific hu-

man rights-based indicators as country sit-

uations differed considerably. As a result,

they wrote a “Guidance Note” to country

level staff providing practical advice on

developing indicators to measure the

realization of human rights at the country

level. At the organizational level, the research-

ers undertook an in-depth analysis of the indicators in the current strategic plan and

proposed a package of new indicators covering all UNICEF program areas, as well as

the human rights principles of universality, equality, interdependency, transparency,

participation and accountability. At the global level, the researchers proposed indica-

tors for UNICEF to recommend for the post-2015 international development agenda

to advance human rights globally. The final products included a 155-page report and

a presentation explaining the researchers’ recommendations to developing human

rights-based indicators.

UNICEF Indicators to Measure the Realization of Human Rights

and continues to question our commitment to justice and the rule of law.” The play was performed on multiple occasions in Boston, including at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, at the Playwrights’ Theatre under the sponsorship of the New England School of Law Journal of Civil and Criminal Commitment, and again at Northeastern Univer-sity. The play also had multiple shows in New York at the Black Box Theater. Brendan Shea of the American Repertory Theatre calls In Our Name a ‘living essay’ in which the United States’ actions at Guantanamo are put on trial.

Professor Rachel RosenbloomIn addition to her faculty affiliation with PHRGE, Professor Rachel Rosenbloom has a faculty affiliation with the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College and works closely with the Center’s Post-Deportation Human Rights Project. Professor Rosenbloom participated in an expert gathering at Boston College Law School in November 2012 to begin work on drafting an International Convention on the Rights of Deportees. In October 2012, Profes-

sor Rosenbloom delivered a keynote address at a symposium entitled Border Crossing: Citizenship, Race, Gender. The symposium marked the launch of a major new interdis-ciplinary research initiative on borders at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Rosenbloom continues to be a plaintiff, along with a number of immigrant advocate organizations, in an ongoing action filed in federal district court against a variety of federal agencies alleging inadequate response by the agencies to a Freedom of Information Act request for materials on the agencies’ policy and practice of facil-itating the return to the U.S. of individuals who successfully challenge their removal orders from outside the country. She is on the board of directors of Justice at Work, an organization that provides legal services to community based labor organizations in Massachusetts with the aim of supporting and encouraging low-wage immigrant worker organizing.

21

PHRGE Partner Organizations

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Faculty Co-Directors Professor Dan DanielsenProfessor Martha F. Davis Professor Lucy A. Williams Professor Margaret Y.K. Woo

StaffKevin Murray, Executive DirectorMariah McGill ’09, Associate DirectorAngela Duger ’11, Ford Foundation FellowJessica Brokaw ’12, Post Graduate FellowKhadija Mboup, Program Coordinator Sasha Varasano, Program CoordinatorRick Doyon, Faculty Secretary Seda Akay Onur’13, LLM Co-op InternMitali Biswas’15, Research InternGregory Carr’13, Research InternZara Day’14, Research InternThompson Lozier’14, Research InternMelanie Medalle’14, Research InternNicole Santiago’14, Research InternSarah Spoffard’15, Research Intern Steven Toff’14, Research InternFrank Vitale’14, Research InternAmanda White’14, Research Intern

Due Diligence ProjectZarizana Aziz, Project Co-Director and PHRGE Visiting ScholarJanine Moussa, Project Co-DirectorAlea Boult, ’13 Research Associate Jennifer Kline,’13 Research Associate

PHRGE Who We Are

Affiliated ScholarsZarizana Abdul Aziz, Visiting ScholarKyle Courtney, Adjunct FacultyMaria Green, Visiting Scholar Gillian MacNaughton, Senior Fellow

Affiliated FacultyProfessor Roger I. AbramsProfessor Aziza AhmedProfessor Brook K. BakerProfessor Leo BeletskyAssociate Dean Luke Bierman Professor Lee P. BreckenridgeProfessor Richard A. DaynardProfessor Rashmi Dyal-ChandProfessor Peter D. Enrich Professor Patricia Illingworth Professor Karl E. KlareClinical Professor Lois Hilfiker KanterProfessor Sarah Hooke Lee Professor Hope Lewis Senior Academic Specialist Susan Maze-Rothstein Professor Michael MeltsnerAssociate Dean Wendy ParmetProfessor David Phillips Professor Sonia Rolland Professor Rachel Rosenbloom

Kevin Murray, Executive Director

Northeastern University

140 Dockser Hall • 360 Huntington Avenue • Boston, Massachusetts 02115

617.373.4972 • k.murray@neu.edu