This year FXB completes 30 years since its founding in 1993. We are taking a moment to mark this milestone, acknowledge the breadth of activities in our community and the continued importance of work that shows how violation of rights harms health. Our programs, from racial justice to distress migration, to our Roma and Palestine programs, are all connected to the idea that we all need both health and rights as a resource for our lives.…
July 2022 offered Harvard graduate students interested in migration issues a unique experience. From simulations of rescue at sea to a meeting with the Greek Minister for Migration, from academic lectures by lawyers, environmentalists, journalists and emergency doctors to visits to refugee camps and centers for unaccompanied child refugees, students from five different Harvard graduate schools had the opportunity to spend three weeks in July 2022 immersed in an inaugural…
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The FXB Center today announced a new fellowship program for racial justice in partnership with the JPB Foundation, featuring five new fellows with diverse backgrounds in health and human rights. The announcement came during the virtual symposium “Anti-Racism in Public Health Policies, Practice and Research,” hosted by the FXB Center to launch its new racial justice initiative, which includes research and a series of conversations on racism as a determinant…
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January 13, 2020 For Immediate Release A new FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University report underscores the need for innovative community strategies to prevent serious violations of children’s rights. The report, “Before, Not After: An Evaluation of CINI’s Preventative Approach to Child Protection in India,” authored by Elizabeth Donger and Jacqueline Bhabha, documents and evaluates the harm prevention work carried out by the children’s rights nonprofit…
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…
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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…
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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”
In March 2018, researchers from Harvard FXB and BRAC (the Bangladeshi-based international nongovernmental organization) conducted a rapid assessment household survey among 800 Rohingya and host families in Ukhia and Teknaf in the District of Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh, on the border of Myanmar. Preliminary results are available here. The study underscored the alarmingly low levels of vaccination among the Rohingya in Myanmar, the high mortality rate among young men…
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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,…
By Rebecca Shin This past year the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University (Harvard FXB) has broadened its child protection pedagogy through three focused initiatives. At the end of June, we completed our first week-long Child Protection Executive Education Course, with leaders from UNICEF and their national partners. Participants from 13 countries across Africa, South America, South and East Asia, Central Europe and the Middle…
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In July 2018, the Government of India’s policy think tank National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) invited feedback on their blueprint for a “National Health Stack.” The National Health Stack would provide the digital infrastructure or technical spine to support India’s recently announced National Health Protection Scheme extending coverage to 500 million people. In response, an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners from across Harvard and India have published…
Continue reading “Reimagining Health Data Exchange: An API-Enabled Roadmap for India”
Thanks to a grant from the Cummings Foundation, the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University (Harvard FXB) is launching a new research project focused on the situation of Romani people in the United States. Since 2012, Harvard FXB has implemented an innovative research and capacity-strengthening program related to the Roma, who have long been an ill-treated minority, facing persecution and, in the past, even slavery.…
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A personal and political story by Victoria Eugenia Ríos-Terheun My mother, originally from the Bay Area and an American, and my father, a Flamenco guitarist and Gitano (Spanish Romani), moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from Morón de la Frontera, Spain to the San Francisco Bay Area shortly before I was born in 1979. They came with my older brother and sister in pursuit of opportunities for my dad’s…
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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…
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Guest Post by John Anusavice April 9 and 10 marked Harvard FXB’s fifth annual Roma conference, “Culture Beyond Borders: The Roma Contribution.” This year the event opened in the evening with a one-woman play, “I Declare at My Own Risk,” written and acted by Alina Şerban, an alumna of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and a Roma artist who grew up in Romania. Her performance delved into the struggles…
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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…
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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 Lara Jirmanus The Syrian refugee crisis has been described as the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. The conflict, which began as a popular uprising in 2011, has become a battleground for regional and global powers, with over 400,000 killed and no end in sight. According to a December 2016 UN report, more than half of the Syrian population has been displaced, including at least 6.3 million internally, 4.8…
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…
By Margareta Matache This is the second 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 their white European counterparts. This second segment shows how the legacy of such thinking…
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Program Goals The FXB Center launched its Human Trafficking and Forced Labor Program in 2012 with the conviction that more effective and sustainable anti-trafficking strategies are critical to address the scourge of human trafficking worldwide. Under the leadership of Jacqueline Bhabha, FXB Director of Research, the program aims to provide the anti-trafficking community with cutting-edge research, advocacy, and training for the next generation of leaders in the field. Research and…
Program Goals The Social Justice and the Right to Health program, founded and directed by Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, is informed by the view that the lack of global progress on women’s and children’s health is not principally due to technical obstacles, but rather to entrenched societal barriers and lack of political will at both the national and international levels. Solutions that ignore root causes and underlying inequalities and…
Over the past two years the François Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University has been researching the factors impinging on educational access for marginalized, Indian adolescent girls, as part of a more general inquiry into agency and empowerment. The goal of the projects is to probe the enduring challenge of female educational disadvantage in India in order to generate an evidence base for enhancing the access of disadvantaged girls to education and to the social, economic and psychological benefits that this education is known to bestow.
