State Sponsored Collective Injustice: Reparations for Roma

Responses to State Sponsored Collective Injustice (past event poster with a photo of the memorial for the Roma holocaust

By John Anusavice On April 8, 2016, Harvard University held its fourth annual Roma conference on the 26 anniversary of International Roma Day. The conference was a pioneering effort to address the wide-ranging question of reparations and to advocate for joint action across historical and geographical spheres. In particular, the event marked a starting point for moving the topic of Romani reparations from the margins of academic and institutional interest…

Child Protection in Iran: A Look at Today

by Krista Oehlke On Wednesday, April 13, as part of Harvard FXB Center’s Works-in-Progress series, , G. Barrie Landry Fellow Maneli Aghakan delivered a presentation on the current state of child protection in Iran. Aghakhan comes to Harvard from the UNICEF Iran office, where she heads the child protection unit. Aghakhan, along with Landry Fellow Ketevan Melikadze, of Georgia, will finish her MPH at the Harvard Chan School with a…

EU Approach to the Syrian Migrant Crisis Ignores the Welfare of Those Already Settled in Europe

“Politicians and the public should be wary of the false reassurance afforded by the decrease in migration rates as a result of the Europe-Turkey agreement.” by Jonathan M. Clarke Recent news reports have described a dramatic reduction in the number of migrants arriving on the shores of Greek islands. On March 26, 2016, the Guardian newspaper reported that the number of migrants arriving on Greek shores had “slowed to a…

The Mean Bargain: The EU/Turkey Refugee and Migrant Deal

The agreement will “create a precedent for globalized indifference to suffering, even when that suffering is on one’s own doorstep…” On March 18 EU leaders and Turkey finally struck their long discussed Grand Bargain. In return for becoming Europe’s buffer against distress migrants fleeing devastating conflict and hardship, President Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian government extracted valuable political and economic booty – the prospect of visa-free travel to the EU for Turkish…

Ending Forced Labor in India: What Does It Take?

For immediate release: Thursday, March 31, 2016 Boston, MA – Neither legal nor socio-economic interventions have eradicated widespread forced and bonded labor in India. But a new report published today by Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights provides some hope for progress. With detailed evidence and meticulous analysis, the report documents the very positive impact of a community organization’s work on entrenched labor exploitation in Uttar Pradesh, India’s…

India’s Aadhaar Program: A Legitimate Trade-off between Social Protection and Privacy?

  Will the most vulnerable … have any ability to insist on their notional right to alternative means of identification…? Aadhaar means “foundation” in Hindi. It is the name given to India’s unique identification program, a program that within the last 5 ½ years has registered over 990 million Indian residents. This month, on March 11, 2016, the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of Parliament, passed the Aadhaar Bill, which…

Alicia Yamin Featured in ActiveHistory’s History Slam Podcast

Harvard FXB Center policy director Alicia Ely Yamin was a recent guest on ActiveHistory.ca’s History Slam Podcast. The 40+ minute conversation centered on her new book, Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity. Along with discussing human rights in a technical sense, Yamin also shares some of the pivotal personal experiences that informed the writing of her book. Check out History Slam’s website for the full podcast and review of…

India’s Approach to the Rescue and Reintegration of Trafficked Children Marred by Poor Coordination, Lack of Accountability

For immediate release: Monday, March 21, 2016 Boston, MA – Labor trafficking is a gross violation that affects hundreds of thousands of Indian children each year. Despite the Indian government’s considerable attention to the problem, the rescue and reintegration apparatus is beset by a range of problems that can leave children at risk of further harm, according to a new report published today by Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health…

Welcome to FXB Fellow Maria del Pilar Carmona

Attorney Maria del Pilar Carmona comes to us from Colombia, where she has for the past three years worked as a research associate and project manager for the Center for Socio-Legal Studies at Universidad de los Andes. Maria has also worked as a lawyer for the Colombian government and as a consultant for the Mexican Supreme Court, the Organization for Health Excellence in Colombia, UN Women, and the World Bank,…

Still Time to Apply to Global School Health Rights Litigation Course

Application Deadline: April 1, 2016 There is still time to join the O’Neill Institute and Harvard FXB for the 2016 Global School Health Rights Litigation course from June 13th – 17th at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC! This one-week intensive course offers participants an opportunity to develop specialist-level knowledge in relation to litigating health-related rights at the national, regional, and international levels. Globally renowned experts will lecture on…

Adolescent Disaster Protection in Nepal and China

For rural communities in Asia, the impact of natural disasters can be devastating. For communities living in remote areas of Nepal, the scale of destruction brought by the 2015 earthquake was especially devastating. Many children lost homes and families, along with access to food and clean water. Harvard FXB Center’s Adolescent Resilience in Disasters Project, led by Dr. Elizabeth Newnham and part of the center’s larger Disaster Resilience and Response…

Senate Passes Bill with Important Implications for Child Trafficking and Labor

“For 85 years, this egregious lacuna in protection has created a procedural backdoor into the American marketplace for goods made by forced or bonded laborers, including children…” With little public fanfare, on Thursday February 11, 2016, the U.S. Senate voted on a critical piece of human rights legislation. The bill closed a loophole allowing the import of products made by forced or child labor when U.S. demand exceeded its domestic…

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

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…

Alicia Yamin Named to EWEC Independent Accountability Panel

Policy Director Alicia Yamin selected to be a member of the Independent Accountability Panel for Every Woman Every Child and the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health (2016-2030). From the announcement: “Last September, the UN Secretary-General launched the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health to help further the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda. This strategy builds on 15 years of progress under the Millennium Development…

Health, Human Rights and the Zika Virus

To fight Zika we must fight poverty and powerlessness and ensure that women enjoy their rights. by Alicia Ely Yamin Health ministers throughout Latin America have announced they will unite to stop the alarming spread of the Zika virus. Similarly, the World Health Organization has acted with uncharacteristic haste to curb this virus, of which the world presently knows very little. But there is much we do know about containing…

World Health Organization and Emergency Health: If Not Now, When?

Center director Jennifer Leaning is co-author on a new article in the British Medical Journal. The article offers a critical look at the response of the World Health Organization to Ebola and other humanitarian crises and puts forward a set of six recommendations for future action. The article is excerpted below, with a link to the full version. Human transmission of Ebola virus began in Guinea in December 2013, but…

Book Launch: Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity

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…

A Glorious Thing Made Up of Stardust

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.…

Roma Education Fund Celebrates Ten Years

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…

2016 Global School Applications

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.

When Water Is Safer Than Land

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…

India Partition Project

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…

Reflections on Harvard’s National ID Conference 2015

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…

Integrated Education in Europe: Privilege or Right?

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…

Benefits, Concerns Around National ID Systems

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…

Modern Slavery and Public Health

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…

A Brief History of National ID Cards

“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…

From Community to Emergency Room

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…

A Global Biometrics Project for Our Times

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…

Where’s the Sex in MNCH?

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…

Protecting Children in Crisis

by Krista Oehlke October 21, 2015. Jacqueline Bhabha yesterday launched this year’s child protection curriculum with a brown bag lunchtime talk entitled “Child Protection and Migration: From Crisis to Crisis.” Bhabha focused on some of the chief protection issues child migrants are facing in today’s world and demanded an overhaul of the way we address them. “Child migration needs to be a central aspect of how we think about in-country…

Fighting for the Right to Health in Kenya

October 21, 2015. This month Allan Maleche, a visiting scholar at Harvard FXB Center, was elected chair of the Global Fund Board’s Implementer Group. Maleche, a passionate human rights advocate, has been working in the field of health and human rights in Kenya, his home country, since 2007. Since 2010 he has served as executive director of KELIN, an award-winning NGO that works to protect and promote health-related human rights.…

Public Health & Climate Change

October 20, 2015. Public health practitioners are uniquely positioned to help build resilience to climate-related disasters at the community level. So argue George Luber and Harvard FXB Fellow Jay Lemery in a recent whitepaper on extreme weather events and their impact on human health. The paper comes in advance of their upcoming book, to be published next month (Wiley). This month Lemery also co-authored a blog on climate change and…

Live Panel on Ending Child Poverty: Tune in at 1:15

October 19, 2015. Today the Coalition Against Child Poverty, which Harvard FXB Center co-founded in 2014, marks its official launch by co-hosting a United Nations side event on Child Poverty and the SDGs. The event will focus on how the SDGs can help children escape poverty and accelerate efforts to end poverty for all. A panel discussion on indicators and implementation, organized by the coalition, will be live-streamed today from…

Towards the End of Child Poverty

A Joint statement from the New Global Coalition to End Child Poverty October 16, 2015. The Global Coalition Against Child Poverty, of which Harvard FXB Center is a founding member, issued a joint statement, Towards the End of Child Poverty, today in anticipation of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on October 17. The joint statement aims to articulate the shared understanding of partners on the importance of…

Tracking Disease at World’s Largest Religious Festival

by Karen Feldscher September, 24, 2015 — From July through September this year, up to 30 million people are traveling to the cities of Nashik and Trimbakeshwar in India to bathe in the holy waters of the Godavari River, as part of the Kumbh Mela Hindu religious festival. Amidst this mass gathering—supported by acres and acres of temporary parking lots, police stations, fire stations, health clinics, streetlights and toilets—a small…

Fourth Legal Latin American Congress on Reproductive Rights: Violence against Women and Reproductive Justice

Harvard FXB Policy Director Alicia Ely Yamin will deliver a keynote address the Fourth Legal Latin American Congress on Reproductive Rights in Peru in November 2015. Objectives Promote dialogue between judicial officers, legislators, academic scholars, and activists on the importance of incorporating international standards of protection of reproductive rights as human rights in court decisions and public policy. Strengthen legal arguments and judicial interpretations with a gender, public health, and…

SDG SERIES: Are the SDGs the Vehicle to End AIDS by 2030?

by Allan Maleche September 17, 2015. This month’s UN summit for the adoption of the post-2015 global development agenda will provide an opportunity for States to endorse 17 new global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  The goals, built on the momentum from implementing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 2000-2015, will guide economic, environmental and social initiatives for the next 15 years. SDG 3, the overarching goal on health issues, seeks to…

SDG SERIES: Leaving No One Behind: Human Rights and Accountability

By Rebecca Brown At the upcoming Summit to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN will adopt the broadest political agreement to date, which in its Preamble announces the goals of eradicating poverty and inequality, achieving sustainable development, realizing the human rights of all, and achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. The agreement rightly points out that it is unprecedented in its scope. Overall,…

Mu’addameen: I offer them to you

The story of a Syrian refugee family in Jordan By Josyann Abisaab September 14, 2015. In Middle Eastern culture, when one expresses admiration for personal belongings such as clothing, jewelry, or decorative accessories, it is customary to offer the praised object in return. However, I did not expect the delicate-faced woman with the melancholic smile wearing a long, black dress and matching embroidered headscarf to offer me her most precious…

A Practical Manifesto for Women and Children’s Health

At an intensive two-day June meeting in Washington, DC, sponsored by UNFPA, center director Jennifer Leaning joined colleagues from around the world to write the penultimate draft of Every Woman, Every Child, a practical manifesto to embed in the discussion of the Sustainable Development Goals that will take place at the meeting of the UN General Assembly  this September in New York City.  The aim during this final drafting workshop…

Groundbreaking Technical Follow-up Commission

Policy Director Alicia Ely Yamin is part of a commission that will report on Brazil’s implementation of Alyne da Silva Pimental v Brazil, a 2008 CEDAW (UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women) Committee  decision recognizing states’ enforceable obligation to address and reduce maternal mortality. This marks the first time any technical follow-up commission has been engaged in providing expert input of this kind on the decision of…

Alicia Yamin on CRR Verification Commission

Policy director Alicia Ely Yamin is part of a verification commission funded by the Center for Reproductive Rights that will report on Brazil’s implementation of a CEDAW decision recognizing states’ immediate, enforceable obligation to address and reduce maternal mortality. This marks the first time any party has followed up with international recommendations regarding maternal health. Below is a timeline of the landmark legal case, Alyne v. Brazil, which precipitated the…

New Fellows at Harvard FXB Center

The Center is pleased to welcome three new fellows to our policy initiatives team and two new recipients of the UNICEF/Harvard School of Public Health G. Barrie Landry Fellowship. Below find a brief introduction to each. Maneli Aghakhan Maneli Aghakhan is a child protection specialist and head of the Child Protection Unit at UNICEF Iran. In recent years her work has focused on prevention of violence against children, justice for…

Policy director Alicia Ely Yamin is part of a verification commission funded by the Center for Reproductive Rights that will report on Brazil’s implementation of a CEDAW decision recognizing states’ immediate, enforceable obligation to address and reduce maternal mortality. This marks the first time any party has followed up with international recommendations regarding maternal health. Below is a timeline of the landmark legal case, Alyne v. Brazil,  which precipitated the…