International Human Rights Day: Time For Reparations

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, 8th Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies is a  distinguished academic, international thought leader, United Nations committee official,  and global public activist in the field of social justice and minority empowerment. 

He received his higher education in the United Kingdom and is Professor of Economic  History. He has lectured extensively in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. He has  published over 100 peer reviewed essays in scholarly journals, and over 20 books on subjects ranging from Atlantic and Caribbean History, gender relations in the Caribbean,  sport development and popular culture. 

Sir Hilary is President of Universities Caribbean, Chairman of the Caribbean Examinations  Council, Chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission and Advisor on Sustainable  Development to former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He has had  widespread global recognition for his academic achievements and leadership expertise, and  was knighted by the Government of Barbados. He has received numerous honorary  doctorates from around the world and recently received the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace  and Freedom Award. 

Jacqueline Bhabha is a Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the Director of Research at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. She received a first class honors degree and an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the College of Law in London.

From 1997 to 2001, Bhabha directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She has published extensively on issues of transnational child migration, refugee protection, children’s rights and citizenship. She is the author of Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age (2014) and Can We Solve the Migration Crisis? (2018). She has edited or co-edited many books, including Children Without A State (2011), Human Rights and Adolescence (2014), Research Handbook on Child Migration (2018), A Better Future: The Role of Education for Displaced and Marginalized People (2020), and A Time for Reparation: Addressing State Responsibility for Collective Injustice (2021, forthcoming).

Bhabha was the founding chair of the Scholars at Risk Network, and she serves on the board of the World Peace Foundation, the Institute for Statelessness and Inclusion, Fortify Rights, the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Journal on Migration and Human Security.

Bridget Conley is associate professor of research and research director at the World Peace Foundation. Her specializations include mass atrocities, genocide, museums, and memorialization. Before joining the WPF, she served as research director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, where she helped establish the Museum’s program on contemporary genocide. Over her ten years at the Museum, she led many of the Museum’s signature projects on genocide, including case study and issue analysis, educational programs, exhibitions, and its podcast series, Voices on Genocide Prevention, which she hosted from 2008-2011. She received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University in 2001.

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation, Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and Professorial Fellow at the London School of Economics. He has worked on the Horn of Africa and on humanitarian issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner, with a special focus on famine and humanitarian crises. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union High Level Panel on Sudan and South Sudan. De Waal’s recent books include: The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (Polity 2015), Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine (Polity 2018), and New Pandemics, Old Politics: 200 years of the war on disease and its alternatives (Polity 2021).

Professor Elkins’s first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was also selected as one of the Economist‘s best history books for 2005, was a New York Times editor’s choice, and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Award. She and her research were also the subjects of a 2002 BBC documentary titled, Kenya: White Terror, which was awarded the International Committee of the Red Cross Award at the Monte Carlos Film Festival. Professor Elkins is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. She has also appeared on numerous radio and television programs including NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC’s The World, and PBS’s Charlie Rose. Professor Elkins’s current research interests include colonial violence and post-conflict reconciliation in Africa, and violence and the decline of the British Empire. She is currently working on two projects: one examining the effects of violence and amnesia on local communities and nation-building in post-independent Kenya; the other analyzing British counter-insurgency operations after the Second World War, with case studies including Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Nyasaland. Professor Elkins teaches courses on modern Africa, protest in East Africa, human rights in Africa, and British colonial violence in the 20th century.

Mireille Fanon-Mendez-France, Frantz Fanon’s daughter, is chairperson of the Frantz Fanon Foundation, member of the Scientific Council of ATTAC France, and expert ex-chair of the Working group on People of African descent. She has worked as professor at different levels of National Education, at UNESCO and as legal adviser at the French National Assembly.

Michael R. Fischbach is professor of history at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, where he has taught since 1992 after receiving his doctorate in modern Middle Eastern history from Georgetown University.

His recent research looks at how the Arab-Israeli conflict caused divisions within the black freedom movement and among left-wing white radicals in America during the 1960s and 1970s. His publications in this area include the books Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Stanford University Press, 2018) and The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (Stanford University Press, 2019). Fischbach also has published several articles and book chapters on these topics, including “Give Peace a Chance? The Anti-War Movement and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” “Transnational Countries of Color: Black Power in America and the Middle East,” and “The New Left and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in America.”

In the past Fischbach has researched and published about issues relating to land and property ownership in the modern Middle East, particularly in connection with Israel/Palestine, Jordan, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is author of several books on this topic: Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries (Columbia University Press, 2008); The Peace Process and Palestinian Refugee Claims: Addressing Claims for Property Compensation and Restitution (United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006); Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2003); and State, Society, and Land in Jordan (Brill, 2000). His two books on Palestinian refugee property have been translated into Arabic.

Aileen Ford is from San Francisco, California. In 2016, she earned a dual master’s degree in Latin American studies and master of public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin. Since the fall of 2016, she has conducted research related to transitional justice and indigenous rights in Guatemala.

Ian Hancock is professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin; honorary vice-chancellor at the International Roma University, Delhi, and a prominent linguist, Romani scholar, and advocate. He is an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.  He has authored and/or edited more than 400 publications, including International English Usage (1986), Roads of the Roma: A PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers (1998), Readings in Creole Studies (1979), and We Are the Romani People (1995). A collection of his essays, edited by D. Karanth, entitled Danger! Educated Gypsy, was published in 2010. He is currently working on a book entitled Littorally Speaking, which examines the origins of the Krio language spoken in Sierra Leone. Two documentary films, one American and one Swedish, are in production, detailing his work and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center; a third is in discussion at the Rafto Foundation offices in Bergen,

Norway. Hancock was instrumental in drafting a 1978 petition at the Second World Romani Congress for admission to the United Nations for Roma, which was accepted in March 1979.

Professor of Historical Memory and Transformative Justice at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht; my current research project Dialogics of Justice (www.dialogicsofjustice.org) explores with a team of 5 scholars civil court cases in the Netherlands, examining landmark decisions regarding historical injustice: colonial violence, failed peace missions, abuse by the church and ecological violence by multinationals such as Shell. We explore the effects of these legal decisions, and the reparation procedures that followed, exploring the conditions under which people do or do not feel recognized.

Douglas A. Johnson is a lecturer in public policy and the former director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

He has been a committed advocate of human rights since the 1970s, when he chaired the Infant Formula Action Coalition, also known as INFACT. He also co-founded the International Nestle Boycott Committee, which had a collective membership of 40 million members and grew to include 120 major national organizations. Johnson has served as a consultant on strategic planning to human rights organizations in Latin America, and as a consultant to UNICEF and the World Health Organization on an international marketing code for breast milk substitutes. Johnson received a masters in public and private management from the Yale School of Organization, and his undergraduate degree in philosophy is from Macalester College.

Dr. Natalia Linos is a social epidemiologist and the Executive Director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard. She has over 15 years of experience working at the global and local levels on some of the most pressing public health challenges of our time: from climate change to systemic racism.

Since 2019, she has helped build a new research area for the FXB Center focused on racial justice. Along with Dr. Bassett, she co-leads the two largest programs in this area, namely to create an actionable field of scholarship on structural racism and health and make the public health case for reparations. These efforts build on their work together, including at the New York City Health Department and research on the social, legal and political determinants of health.

Prior to her role at Harvard, Natalia worked at the United Nations for over a decade in diverse roles. From 2016 to 2019, she led UNDP’s work at the nexus of health, climate change and the environment, and briefly served as interim Chief of Staff for the Bureau for Programme and Policy Support. From 2007 to 2014, she served as a policy specialist in Beirut, Lebanon, and later as an adviser and speech writer to former UNDP Administrator and Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark, while also completing her doctoral studies.

Natalia has a strong commitment to public service and bringing public health expertise into political decision-making. In 2020 and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Natalia ran for Congress to represent Massachusetts’ fourth Congressional district. She is currently a Town Meeting Member in Brookline and is a member of Brookline’s Advisory Council on Public Health. She also serves on the Board of the Environmental League of Massachusetts.

Natalia is a three-time Harvard University graduate, earning her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, Master of Science in Social Epidemiology, and Doctor of Science in Social Epidemiology here. She also holds a Certificate in Forced Migration from Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre. She speaks Greek fluently and has basic conversational skills in Arabic, Spanish and French. Natalia has three young children.

Dr. Margareta (Magda) Matache is a scholar from Romania, director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights’ Roma Program and a Harvard instructor. Her research and teaching focus on the history and manifestations of anti-Roma racism, as well as the global history of race and racism. From 2005 to 2012, Dr. Matache was the Executive Director of Romani CRISS, a human rights organization that defends the rights of Roma. In 2012,she was awarded a Hauser postdoctoral fellowship at the FXB Center, where she founded the University’s Roma Program. In 2017, with Jacqueline Bhabha and Andrzej Mirga, she co-edited Realizing Roma Rights, an investigation of anti-Roma racism in Europe. Also, along with Jacqueline Bhabha and Caroline Elkins, Dr. Matache is the co-editor of Time for Reparations, a forthcoming volume exploring the issue of reparations across a broad range of historical and geographic contexts and academic disciplines. Her other publications and research have ranged from the rights and agency of Romani children and adolescents to early childhood development, anti-Roma racism, reparations, segregation in education, and participatory action research.

She completed her Master’s in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and her doctoral degree in Political Sciences from the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Bucharest. She also holds a master’s degree in European Social Policies.

Luis Moreno Ocampo was the Founder Chief Prosecutor of the new and permanent International Criminal Court (2003-12). He wrote a book “War and Justice in the 21st Century” to be published by Oxford University Press in 2022. He is in private practice assisting Syrian victims to obtain compensation from those financing terrorist organizations. He is a visiting Professor at USC Cinematic Arts, teaching about narratives about war, crimes, and justice.  

Previously, he had a critical role during the transition to Democracy in Argentina. In 1985 he was Deputy Prosecutor in the trial against the “Military Junta”, and the Prosecutor in military rebellion cases in 1988 and 1991.

He was a Visiting Professor at Stanford (2002) and Harvard University (2003), “Distinguished visiting scholar”, New York University, Law School,(2012/13), “Senior Fellow”, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale University (2014/15) and a “Senior Fellow” Harvard University, Kennedy School, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (2015/2021) and a Visiting Professor, Hebrew University, Law School (2018/2020)and Al Quds University.

Phuong Pham, Ph.D., MPH, <span style=”font-weight: 400″>is an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of Education at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI). She has over 20 years of experience in designing and implementing </span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>mixed-method </span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>research, </span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>technology </span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>solutions, and capacity building programs in conflict transitioning</span><span style=”font-weight: 400″> countries. </span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>She co-founded Peacebuildingdata.org (a portal of peacebuilding, human rig</span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>hts, and justice indicators) and </span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>KoboToolbox (a suite of software for digital data collection and visualization)</span><span style=”font-weight: 400″> as well as co-directing DataPop (</span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>a global coalition on Big Data and development</span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>)</span><span style=”font-weight: 400″>. </span></p>
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Bert Samuels has practiced law in Jamaica for more than 40 years, and is currently Partner and Head of Litigation with the firm Knight, Junor & Samuels. His career began with graduation from the University of the West Indies and Norman Manley Law School, and his areas of practice have centred on Industrial Relations, and Civil and Criminal Litigation. He has sat for five years on the Disciplinary Committee of the General Legal Council of Jamaica, and is a frequent presenter for continuing legal education seminars with that body.

A passionate pan-Africanist, he continues to advocate for changes to inherited colonial laws with a view to to further liberating a post-slavery Jamaica. After twelve years as a member, he now serves as Deputy Chairman of the Jamaican National Council on Reparation, and leads their Legal Working Group.

In addition to his legal work, Bert is also a recognized writer and social commentator. His play, “The Trial of Governor Eyre”, placed the former British-appointed governor on trial for overseeing colonial violence and eventual mass murder in 1865, and was nominated in multiple categories for the Actor Boy Awards. He recently contributed a chapter to the upcoming publication, “Time for Reparations”, published by Harvard University, in which he outlines the strong case for Jamaica’s claim. His 2021 and latest appointment is that of one of the 12 commissioners who presided over the International Commission of Inquiry on Systematic racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States.

Bert has also written extensively for Jamaica’s leading newspapers and is frequently interviewed by media houses on issues examining law, history, social justice, and reparation.

Albie Sachs is an activist and a former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa (1994–2009). He began practicing as an advocate at the Cape Bar at the age of twenty-one, defending people charged under the racial statutes and security laws of apartheid. After being arrested and placed in solitary confinement for more than five months, Sachs went into exile in England, where he completed a PhD from Sussex University. He is the author of several books, including “The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs”; “Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter”; “The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law”; and “We, the People: Insights of an Activist Judge.” His latest book is “Oliver Tambo’s Dream.”

Susan Slyomovics conducts research on the expressive culture of the Middle East and North Africa, gender and human rights, the overlap between oral and written literature, and the relationship between visual anthropology and literature. She is the Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Professor of the Study of Women in the Developing World and professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In a book on human rights in Morocco that she plans to write at Radcliffe, Slyomovics will analyze and document the ways in which Morocco’s plans to revamp its judicial, court, and police systems go hand in hand with the national response to years of human rights violations. She will address such questions as: What governmental and educational organs (a truth commission? indemnity commission?) will be charged with recording this past history of abuse? How is civil society to be reconstructed after periods of authoritarian rule in Morocco? What role can artists and ritual play in public truth telling and the construction of a civil society?

Slyomovics has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program (Egypt, 1982–1983; Morocco, 1999–2000), the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her book, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), received the 1999 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association and the 1999 Chicago Folklore Prize. A 1971 graduate of Barnard College, she earned her PhD in Near Eastern studies from the University of California at Berkeley.

&lt;span style=”font-weight: 400″&gt;Dr. Vinck is the Research Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. His current research focuses on resilience, peacebuilding, and social cohesion in contexts of mass violence, conflicts and natural disasters. This research has led him to examine the role of technology and ethics of data in the field. He holds assistant professor appointments at the Harvard T.H. Chan school of Public Health and Harvard Medical School and is a lead investigator at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Vinck is the co-founder and director of KoBoToolbox a digital data collection platform, and the Data-Pop Alliance, a Big Data partnership with MIT and ODI.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
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