Month: January 2016

On Tuesday, January 27, Policy Director Alicia Yamin launched her new book, Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why They Matter, with a roundtable discussion at Harvard University’s Global Health Education and Learning Incubator. Discussants included Professor Deborah Maine of Columbia University; Professor Katharine Young of Boston College Law School; Gerald Neuman of Harvard Law School; and Paul Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor of…

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January 26, 2016. A few days before his 27th birthday, Rohith Vemula hanged himself in the venue where he and other Dalit student activists gathered for their meetings and discussions.  A second-year PhD student in life sciences at the prestigious Hyderabad Central University (among India’s top 10), Vemula wrote in his suicide letter: “I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body. And I have become a monster.…

Continue reading “A Glorious Thing Made Up of Stardust”

Center instructor and prominent Roma rights advocate Margareta Matache is featured in a short video documentary on the work of the Roma Education Fund, of which she is a Board member. Since 2005 – the beginning of Europe’s Decade of Roma Inclusion – the REF has worked to close the educational gap between Roma and non-Roma children across the European Union. In addition to Matache, the video features George Soros…

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Applications for the Global School on Health Rights Litigation (June 13-17, 2016) are now being accepted. This year Harvard FXB has partnered with the prestigious O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, which will hold the one-week intensive course. Application deadline: April 1, 2016. Visit the website for application details.

by Jacqueline Bhabha The jubilation that accompanied the flowering of the Arab Spring is long gone as its deadly aftermath—in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere—spirals into transcontinental turmoil. We face the prospect of a grim winter. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people in flight from those indiscriminate civil wars (not to mention the chaos in Iraq and Yemen, the turmoil in parts of Africa, and the ethnic oppression in Myanmar) face…

Continue reading “When Water Is Safer Than Land”

Center director Jennifer Leaning is leading a study into the humanitarian dimensions of what is still the largest recorded instance of forced migration, the 1947 partition of British India. In December, Leaning traveled to Lahore and Karachi to forge collaborations with university colleagues in both cities to pursue archival research on the Pakistani humanitarian response to the several million who entered Pakistan during those years. The project, housed at Harvard’s…

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