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In a recent op-ed, Dr. Mary T. Bassett, director of the Harvard FXB Center, and Dr. Chad Brummett of the University of Michigan explain how stigma has hindered efforts to address the opioid overdose crisis. Read the op-ed on Bridge Michigan’s website. Learn more about Stigma and Access to Treatment, the University of Michigan – Harvard University summit on the opioid crisis.
2019-21 Climate and Human Health Fellow Dr. Caleb Dresser at the Climate Strike in Boston on September 20, 2019. Climate change poses an urgent threat to our fundamental human rights, including the right to health. An irrefutable body of scientific evidence demonstrates the various mechanisms through which climate change directly and indirectly threatens human health and well-being. Agricultural resources and land use have already been affected by climate change; water…
Continue reading “Climate Week 2019: Addressing an Urgent Threat to Health”
Wednesday 12th June It’s unbearable. I walk down a steep winding earth path between small tents and hovels made of plastic, scrap wood and blankets, clustered around smoking fires. There is rubbish everywhere, and the smell of human faeces. At one point the path runs beside a high mesh fence, topped with razor wire and cameras. Inside are the familiar white containers and yet more filthy tents crammed in between…
Continue reading “The Migrant Diaries: Vathy, Samos, Greece 2019”
By Jacqueline Bhabha and Mary T. Bassett The United States continues to pull ahead in a xenophobic race to the bottom, making fear and trauma central to its border control toolkit. The list is long: Executive orders purporting to ban Muslims, slashing refugee admission quotas, reversing well-established legal precedent protecting the right to asylum of rape and domestic violence survivors, the willful fueling of deportation fear among law-abiding residents, and…
A new International Organization for Migration (IOM) report released today takes a closer look at the deaths and disappearances of migrants around the world. “Fatal Journeys: Volume 4” focuses on missing migrant children. According to IOM data, nearly 1,600 children have been reported dead or missing since 2014 – a likely undercount. Although it is well known that children are one of the most vulnerable groups of migrants, data on…
Continue reading “Professor Bhabha: States Have an Obligation to Protect Migrant Children”
Photo courtesy of the David J. Sencer CDC Museum By Carmel Williams, PhD Now in its 25th year of publication, the Harvard FXB journal, Health and Human Rights, has just published its June issue. It is a feat for a journal to not just survive the economic and academic climates of 25 years, but to hold a position of leadership in the field. Because that is what our journal does.…
Continue reading “Engaging with Health Rights in the Field and Closer to Home”
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/632666883″ params=”color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /] The June 6th episode of Harvard Chan: This Week in Health features a special conversation between Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood and one of the co-founders of Supermajority, and Mary T. Bassett, director of the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Richards spoke about how Supermajority is working to empower women and organize them around key issues related to gender equity, including…
By Dr. Mary T. Bassett A woman arrives at Harlem Hospital in labor having received no prenatal care. The doctors delivering her baby didn’t realize she had heart disease until she went into cardiac arrest in the labor room. The baby survived. The mother, who was Black, did not. Her death was the first that I witnessed while I was completing my medical training. Unfortunately, the number of women dying…
For the past seven years, the Harvard FXB Center for Health & Human Rights has marked International Roma Day. In a guest blog, writer and activist Grattan Puxon (pictured above) explains the history of this important day. An excerpt of the blog is below. To read the full blog post, click here. An Account of the First World Roma Congress Held in London in 1971 By Grattan Puxon | Harvard…
Continue reading “London, 1971: The First World Roma Congress”
Harvard FXB’s Dr. Satchit Balsari speaks at the workshop. On April 3rd, the India Digital Health Net (IDHN), a multidisciplinary research and development initiative established to support an Application Programming Interface-enabled (API) federated health data architecture in India, convened a workshop in New Delhi to learn from the several initiatives across the country that are building components of what may ultimately become India’s health tech grid. The workshop was organized with support…
Continue reading “Powering the Personal Health Record: Catalysts and Barriers in India”
Note: This post has been updated to includes photos from Neglected Voices: The Global Roma Diaspora April 8th marks International Roma Day, a day we celebrate Romani people across the world. Romani people, who have origins in North India, have made distinct and important contributions to Europe and the Americas in many fields, including literature, arts, crafts, music, science, and sports. International Roma Day is also a time to increase awareness…
Continue reading “International Roma Day: Lifting Neglected Voices”
Lebanon, the country with the highest per capita ratio of refugees, is heavily burdened by the crisis in Syria. As of December 2018, an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees are living in Lebanon, two-thirds of whom are registered with the Lebanese government. Previous studies have found that the crisis has disproportionately affected poor and underserved areas in Lebanon, contributing to social tensions between Lebanese people and Syrian refugees and driving…
One in One Hundred: Drivers of Success and Resilience among College-Educated Romani Adolescents in Serbia New report on factors for success among Romani college students challenges the narrative of Roma indifference to education For immediate release: December 20, 2018 One of the major factors in whether Roma adolescents continue on to university is if they have significant support from a non-Roma teacher or peer in combatting everyday racism in school,…
Continue reading “One in One Hundred: Roma Value Education But Face Racism in Access”
Berlin Memorial to the Roma and Sinti Murdered by Nazism /Photo by Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0 By Marian Mandache August 2 marks the Day of Remembrance for Victims of the Roma Holocaust. Between 500,000 and 1.5 million Roma were exterminated during the Holocaust by the Nazi regimes and their allies. The memory of the Romani victims and survivors is yet to be fully recognize and preserved in history books,…
On Friday, September 22, 2017, members of Harvard FXB’s Burden of War Project team, including FXB director and co-chair of the Lancet-American University of Beirut Commission on Syria, Dr. Jennifer Leaning, participated in the high-level side event, Protecting Health Care in Armed Conflict at the 72nd United Nations General Assembly. The Permanent Missions of Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom, in collaboration with the Lancet-AUB Commission on Syria…
Continue reading “Protecting Health Care in Armed Conflict: Harvard FXB at UNGA 72”
The Harvard FXB Field Education Internship Program is a university-wide program established in 2014 at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. The FXB Field Education Internship Program engages Harvard students in global community service and bridges connections between academia and practice in a university-wide effort. The program provides an opportunity for Harvard students to expand their knowledge of and…
Continue reading “Spotlight on the Harvard FXB Field Education Internship Program”
‘I Did Not Choose to Be Here’ by Lynne Jones Tijuana, Mexico* Thursday May 5, 2017 The problem with making any plans to work with migrant children is that they migrate. Amparo, one of my hosts, had also asked me to do a camera/storytelling workshop with a group of Haitian children living in a shelter here in Tijuana. But four days ago she discovered they that they have all gone…
Sheri Fink, Harvard FXB Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent for the New York Times, has a new piece out on the brutality of some C.I.A. interrogation tactics from the testimony of the men who designed and implemented them. Read her story, co-written with James Risen, here now: http://nyti.ms/2sonIeH You can find a reflection and follow-up by Sheri on this story here. And for more from Sheri, go here.
The Lancet-American University of Beirut (AUB) Commission on Syria, which FXB director Dr. Jennifer Leaning co-chairs, published its first health policy paper, “Health workers and the weaponisation of health care in Syria: a preliminary inquiry” by Fouad M. Fouad, Annie Sparrow, Ahmad Tarakji, Mohamad Alameddine, Fadi El-Jardali, Adam P. Coutts, Nour El Arnaout, Lama Bou Karroum, Mohammed Jawad, Sophie Roborgh, Aula Abbara, Fadi Alhalabi, Ibrahim AlMasri, and Samer Jabbour. This video…
Continue reading “Video: The Weaponization of Health Care in Syria”
The Summer 2017 issue of the Harvard Educational Review (HER) includes “Reclaiming Adolescence: A Roma Youth Perspective,” a paper about the FXB Roma Program research in Serbia in partnership with the Center for Interactive Pedagogy. Jacqueline Bhabha, Arlan Fuller, Margarete Matache, Jelena Vranjesevic, Miriam Chernoff, Boris Spasic, and Jelena Ivanis coauthored it. Most of the abstract and a few sentences from the opening paragraph appear below: In this article, the…
Continue reading “Reclaiming Roma Adolescence in Harvard Educational Review”
“Me sem rom, me sem romni” March, 2011 | Photo courtesy of Romani CRISS By Margareta Matache [This is the third of a three-part blog series, “The White Norm in Gypsy and Romani Studies,” about the racialization and othering of Romani people against a white norm in standard Gypsy and Romani studies. The first segment explored the contribution of Gypsy studies to the perception of the Roma as inferior to…
‘Don’t Hate Migrants’ by Lynne Jones Chiapas, Mexico: Ciudad Hidalgo on the border of Guatemala and Mexico* Sunday April 9, 2017 When I asked the tall woman with the tiny baby why she left El Salvador, she answered in five words: Because they killed my husband. The tiny baby is 27 days old. She holds him close against her chest with a cloth pulled over to protect him from the…
by Harvard FXB Staff On March 14, 2017, Albina du Boisrouvray was awarded the honor of Officier de la Légion d’honneur, France’s highest order of merit, in a ceremony at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, France. Jean-Marc Ayrault, French Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Development, presided over the ceremony attended by close friends and family, including Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins sans Frontières, with whom she worked for…
By Elizabeth H. Shlala One of the primary reasons that Sri Lankan women migrate is motherhood. 1.2 million Sri Lankans work abroad; 300,000 of them migrate as domestic workers to Saudi Arabia alone. In 2012 86% of all female migrant workers went abroad to be domestic workers or “housemaids.” 97% of Sri Lankan domestic workers migrated to the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,…
Continue reading “Loving Children by Leaving Them: The Sri Lankan Mother’s Dilemma”
By Susan Lloyd McGarry From Australia to Venezuela, from Azerbajian to Vietnam, and many places in between, more than 60 news outlets and websites in at least 15 countries and 10 languages have published information about the recent Harvard FXB report Emergency Within An Emergency: The Growing Epidemic of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Children in Greece. Excerpts and links from some of that coverage is below. Our…
Continue reading “Preventing Abuse and Sexual Exploitation of Child Migrants in Greece”
By Krista Oehlke On Tuesday, May 2 at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights celebrated and honored its Child Protection Certificate recipients in an award ceremony. The celebration marked a milestone at the Center. Now in its third year, the program has grown exponentially and across disciplines. This spring, 20 graduate students from across the University – from the…
Continue reading “The Harvard FXB Center Celebrates Child Protection Certificate Recipients”
By Elizabeth Donger and Ayesha Mehrotra Every afternoon Meera walks around her neighborhood in Digha, a slum area on the banks of the Ganges in India’s Bihar State, knocking on the empty doorframes. A community protection volunteer with the nonprofit Aangan Trust, she targets families that she knows do not have Aadhaar cards, the national biometric ID card. She explains to parents that Aadhaar is essential for their children’s future,…
Continue reading “Aadhar and Child Protection in India: Access for the Poorest Remains Elusive”
FXB director Dr, Jennifer Leaning has long been concerned about climate change from a humanitarian and human rights perspective, particularly as it affects forced migration. She addresses this topic in two recent videos. First, for the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE), she talks about the evolution of her understanding of climate change, including the impact of her work with refugees from Darfur. Go to the HUCE profile of…
By Margareta Matache, Jacqueline Bhabha, and Andrzej Mirga On March 14, in Fogarasi and Others v. Romania, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) condemned Romanian police officers for their inhuman treatment of a Romani family. According to this highly respected international human rights court, the EU member state’s conduct, as enacted by its law enforcement agents, constituted a breach of Article 3 of the European Convention, which provides that…
Continue reading “Does Power Listen to Truth in the Case of the Romani People?”
By Jennifer Leigh and Jennifer Leaning The United States can hesitate no longer to enforce international humanitarian law in the Syrian war. The clear-cut use of chemical weapons against civilian populations in northern Syria on Tuesday April 4th violates long-established legal doctrine against the use of these indiscriminate and brutal weapons in war and has inflicted death on scores of civilian women and children. The Syrian government attack in Khan…
Dr. Satchit Balsari received a prestigious 2016 Dr B.C. Roy National Award from Pranab Mukherjee, President of India, at a ceremony in New Delhi on March 28, 2017. He was honored for outstanding services in the field of sociomedical relief. Dr. Balsari has long had an affiliation with the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, currently as a Research Fellow. He is also an alumnus of…
For Immediate Release, Boston MA, March 29, 2017 Today Harvard FXB research director Jacqueline Bhabha and instructor and director of the Roma Program Margareta Matache announce the release of Realizing Roma Rights, a volume they have edited with Andrzej Mirga, Chair of the Roma Education Fund. The book, published by University of Pennsylvania Press, investigates anti-Roma racism and documents a growing Roma-led political movement engaged in building a more inclusive and…
By Marge Dwyer The stories told by health workers from Syria were heartbreaking. They spoke of making desperate attempts to save people injured in a chemical attack on a hospital… of struggling to save people’s eyesight after they were hit in the face by shrapnel and rocks… of delivering babies, only to have them die later because they needed crucial medicines that were not available because of war conditions. These…
Continue reading “Stories from Aleppo: Medical Workers under Siege”
Congratulations to FXB fellow, Dr. Jumana Odeh, for her selection as one of four 2017 World of Children awardees. The award recognizes her for her long-standing work at the Palestinian Happy Child Centre in Ramallah with children who have developmental and learning disabilities or neurological disorders. This award is particularly prestigious as it is the alumni award–given to former awardees for their substantial further contributions. Dr. Odeh had previously been…
Continue reading “Dr. Jumana Odeh Honored with 2017 World of Children Award”
On March 14, the Lancet-American University of Beirut (AUB) Commission on Syria, which FXB director Dr. Jennifer Leaning co-chairs, published its first health policy paper, “Health workers and the weaponisation of health care in Syria: a preliminary inquiry” by Fouad M. Fouad, Annie Sparrow, Ahmad Tarakji, Mohamad Alameddine, Fadi El-Jardali, Adam P. Coutts, Nour El Arnaout, Lama Bou Karroum, Mohammed Jawad, Sophie Roborgh, Aula Abbara, Fadi Alhalabi, Ibrahim AlMasri, and…
Continue reading “The Weaponization of Healthcare: From the Lancet/AUB Commission on Syria”
The FXB Center for Health and Human Rights will host the Fifth Annual Roma Conference, Culture Beyond Borders: The Roma Contribution, at Harvard University to mark International Roma Day. The event will bring together academic, literary, artistic, and student communities to explore the contributions of the Roma community to global culture, arts, and material production. The Harvard FXB Center has organized an event on International Roma Day for the past four years. Previous…
Continue reading “April 9 & 10 Culture Beyond Borders: The Roma Contribution”
The January 27 executive order restricting travel, immigration, and refugee entry to the United States signaled major policy changes in those areas. Despite the recent stay of the immigration order upheld by the 9th District Court of Appeals, litigation is likely to continue and the attitudes implicit in these orders are likely to reappear in policy. FXB’s director Jennifer Leaning and director of research Jacqueline Bhabha have recorded a podcast…
By Alexandra Lancaster Undocumented migrants who embark on the perilous journey by sea to Australia in search of asylum are taken to detention centers offshore on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on the Republic of Nauru (an impoverished island-country in the Pacific). There they are processed and there they stay. Australia is one of the few countries that allow people to be detained indefinitely. There are approximately 1200…
Continue reading “Why the Australia-US Deal? Unwanted, Stranded Refugees”
Brief Background In a Facebook Live event (click here to go to the webcast of 45 minutes) at Harvard Kennedy School on February 3, Professor Jacqueline Bhabha, FXB’s director of research, discussed refugees and the January 27 US executive order on immigration with Matt Cadwallader. The order (full text here) covers several points, among them: a 90-day ban on all travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia,…
Continue reading “In the News: No Correlation Between Refugees and Terrorists, Facebook Live”
Late afternoon Friday, January 27, 2017, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order changing US policies and procedures regarding immigration and refugees. The situation is in flux. On February 3 in Seattle, federal judge James Robart, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, issued a nationwide stay, temporarily stopping enforcement of the order and ordering airlines to allow affected passengers to fly into the United States. Since the…
Continue reading “In the News: FXB and the US Immigration Executive Order”
By Vasileia Digidiki and Jacqueline Bhabha Struggling to manage Europe’s worst humanitarian crisis in recent history, with hundreds of thousands of migrants in legal limbo in all of Europe as anti-immigration sentiments gain ground, countries in Europe and the European Union (EU) in particular now face a new set of challenges: devastating weather conditions necessitating an immediate humanitarian response to end further loss of human life among the most vulnerable.…
Continue reading “A Chilling Environment: Icy Conditions Threaten Migrants’ Health”
By Arlan Fuller Over the past three months, the Myanmar military has led a violent campaign targeting the Rohingya people in Rakhine State and currently shows no signs of relenting. In early October, the government cited an attack on border police as justification for a wide-sweeping offensive targeting men, women and children, with beatings, incinerated homes, systematic rape, and extrajudicial killings. In Myanmar (once known as Burma) on January 20,…
Continue reading “Who Will Act on Behalf of the Rohingya People of Myanmar?”
By Samuel Isaac The practice of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in Eritrea has been declining since initial data were collected in 1995. The percentage of girls and women who have undergone FGM/C declined from 95 percent in 1995 to 89 percent in 2002 and 83 percent in 2010.[1] In fact, 83 percent (the data point from 2010) might hide even greater recent progress, since the respondents who answered positively –…
Continue reading “Accelerating the Eradication of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting in Eritrea”
Guest Post by Dana Moss On December 12, 2016, after Israel’s High Court of Justice refused to end the administrative detention of two Palestinian hunger strikers, moving only to suspend it, the Palestinians vowed to continue their strike—and additionally to stop drinking water, which put them at immediate risk of death. Their case highlights the continued and excessive use of administrative detention in Israel (a procedure that allows the Israeli…
Continue reading “Detention, Hunger Strikes, and Human Rights”
May All Who Need Refuge Find It in the Coming Year, at Home or Elsewhere Thank You for Accompanying Us in this Work Best Wishes for the Holidays and the New Year
For immediate release: Tuesday, December 20, 2016 “Syria has become the mirror, in which we face the grim reality that because of dismal failure at the level of politics, law, governance, and solidarity, our world has degraded in expectation, vision, and human security,” from “Comment: The Lancet–American University of Beirut Commission on Syria: A New Role for Global Health in Conflict and A Call for Papers,” The Lancet 388, Dec…
Continue reading “Health in Conflict: New Lancet-AUB Commission on Syria”
By Vasileia Digidiki Nine months after the historic agreement between the European Union and Turkey,[1] approximately 60,000 refugees and migrants are stranded in Greece, waiting and hoping for another chance at resettlement in a safe country, away from the violence, war, and persecution they faced at home. Among these are an estimated 2,300 unaccompanied minors.[2] Continued daily arrivals further increase the number of vulnerable people stranded in Greece, as European…
By Krista Oehlke Violence stemming from the drug trade has been surmounting in Mexico for decades, taking an increased toll on civilian communities. In October 2016, Sergio Aguayo, FXB fellow and research professor at the Centro de Estudios Internacionale of the El Colegio de México, released a new report investigating two mass killings in Mexico by the criminal organization known as Los Zetas. In 2010, the drug gang allegedly massacred…
By Rebecca Hope This guest post was originally published on the YLabs blog. Rebecca Hope discusses the importance of youth participatory approaches, which can place young people at the center of program design. She highlights the Harvard’s FXB Center and CIP Center’s 2012-2014 Reclaiming Adolescence project in Serbia, which aimed to address anti-Roma racism by strengthening Romani youth leadership in research and policy making. The program involved youth at every stage – from…
Continue reading “Human-Centered Design, High School Kids, and Harvard Professors”
Throughout the world, children flee peril in their place of origin, but often they exchange one set of dangers for another. A new report published today by Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights finds that protection for children on the move, particularly during time of transit, is lacking worldwide. Children on the Move: An Urgent Human Rights and Child Protection Priority, which began as a research project…
