Category: Blog

    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    

On Wednesday, February 10, Professor Emily Y. Y. Chan spoke as part of Harvard FXB Center’s Work-In-Progress series. Chan outlined her intent to expand her ongoing research on the elderly in Asia. Specifically, she focused on the need for further research into the needs and vulnerabilities of the elderly post disasters. Speaking from her field experience, Chan stressed the importance of dignity and protection for this population. While much research…

Continue reading “WIP: Health, Rights and Protection of the Aged: The Case of Older People in Natural Disasters”

Video from the February 4, 2016 Harvard Chan Leadership Studio Seminar, “Global Maternal Newborn Health: Current Progress and Future Directions.” Featuring Harvard FXB Center director of Policy, Alicia Eli Yamin.

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…

Continue reading “Book Launch: Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity”

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…

Continue reading “Roma Education Fund Celebrates Ten Years”

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…

Continue reading “India Partition Project”

by Justin Hughes “…we still remain far less cynical about the motives of the private sector than we do our (usually) elected officials.” I recently had the privilege of attending the National ID Conference at Harvard University. Over the course of a packed few days, we heard from an array of exceptional speakers, had many interesting discussions and were kept (mostly!) on schedule by an excellent set of moderators and…

Continue reading “Reflections on Harvard’s National ID Conference 2015”

by Margareta Matache “A worldwide recognized right has progressively been recast into something those with only privileged status can enjoy.” “I am proud that my son is graduating from high school this year. There are few Roma children in our community who finish high school. If my boy had had an education where he was separated from other (non-Roma) children, he would no longer be in school now, he would…

Continue reading “Integrated Education in Europe: Privilege or Right?”

On November 3 Center instructor and Roma rights specialist Magareta Matache spoke at an Institute of Medicine  convening, the Forum on Investing in Young Children Globally. On the panel Reaching and Investing in Children at the Margins, Matache spoke on ethnic and linguistic diversity among young Roma children in Europe.    

by Amy Roeder This article originally appeared on the website of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. November 24, 2015. Across the globe, legal identification is required for essential tasks such as opening a bank account, accessing government assistance, and registering for school. But around a third of the world’s population — 2.4 billion people — lack an official ID. While some countries are now grappling with the challenges…

Continue reading “Benefits, Concerns Around National ID Systems”

By Krista Oehlke It has been estimated that 80 million people – millions of them children – are enslaved, in varying forms, around the world. Its imprint is all around us. For example, a seminal 2014 Harvard FXB Center report authored by Siddharth Kara exposes the shocking conditions to which young children are exposed in India’s hand-woven carpet industry, a major source of carpets  for the United States. And yet…

Continue reading “Modern Slavery and Public Health”

“ID card adoption is more likely following economic or political shocks” by Connor T. Jerzak National ID cards can provoke diverse reactions. In some countries, identity cards are seen as uncontroversial,even boring, documents. In others, the cards can arouse heated controversy. In short, what is striking about national ID cards is how debate over their merits has varied over space and time. In this blog, we trace out this evolution…

Continue reading “A Brief History of National ID Cards”

On October 30 Director Jennifer Leaning delivered a keynote at the Annual Conference on Disaster Preparedness and Response 2015: From Community to Emergency Room in Hong Kong. The conference was the culmination of the first year of Harvard FXB Center’s involvement in the Disaster Resilience and Response Program, a collaboration between the center, local universities, and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Disaster Preparedness and Response Institute. Leaning’s keynote outlined risks…

Continue reading “From Community to Emergency Room”

by Justin Hughes and Andrew Hopkins Preserving and protecting the identity of refugees has never been more critical. As hundreds of thousands continue to flee conflict and persecution across the world, the lack of a verifiable identity leaves many of them vulnerable to exploitation and limits their chances to get assistance and build a new life. Fears that this system will be exploited by criminals have contributed to the need…

Continue reading “A Global Biometrics Project for Our Times”

October 23, 2015. Harvard FXB Center’s Policy Director Alicia Yamin addressed the final plenary session of the Global Maternal Newborn Health Conference on October 21, 2015. While health is essential to the self-realization of all people, Yamin noted, a focus on the sexual and reproductive rights of women is especially important because allowing women to control their bodies and their lives is fundamental to their being seen as full, dignified…

Continue reading “Where’s the Sex in MNCH?”