Hon.Agnes Binagwaho has served as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health in Rwanda since October 2008. She specialized in emergency pediatrics, neonatology, and the treatment of HIV/AIDS; and she chairs the Rwandan Pediatric Society. From 1986 to 2002, she practiced medicine in public hospitals in Rwanda and several other countries before joining Rwanda's National AIDS Control Commission as Executive Secretary. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Public Library of Science, and the Harvard University Health and Human Rights Journal. Dr. Binagwaho co‐chaired the Millennium Development Goal Project Task Force on HIV/AIDS and Access to Essential Medicines for the Secretary‐General of the United Nations under the leadership of Professor Jeffrey Sachs. She was the global co‐chair of the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS. In addition to her medical degree and Master in Peadiatry, she received an Honorary Doctor of Sciences from Dartmouth College. Dr. Binagwaho serves as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of Harvard Medical School.

Abstract
The most important post-Nuremberg health-related human right and bioethics principle is informed consent. A series of post-9/11 developments, including quarantine and forced vaccination proposals, "altered standards of care" for disaster responders, eliminating consent for "emergency research," the post-ACA rise of "standard of care research," whole genome screening guidelines for adults and children, and proposals for newborns, gene bank proposals for "broad" or no consent, and the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo and in US prisons, all suggest that informed consent should be seen as optional, and judged by a physician-determined standard of care. It's time to kill these zombies, and save the life of informed consent, and thus of the individual person who retains dignity and human rights.

George Annas is the cofounder of Global Lawyers and Physicians, a transnational professional association of lawyers and physicians working together to promote human rights and health.  He has degrees from Harvard College (A.B. economics, '67), Harvard Law School (J.D. '70) and Harvard School of Public Health (M.P.H. '72).

Professor Annas is the author or editor of 18 books on health law and bioethics, including Worst Case Bioethics:  Death, Disaster, and Public Health(2010),Public Health Law (2007),American Bioethics: Crossing Human Rights and Health Law Boundaries(2005),The Rights of Patients(3d ed. 2004),Some Choice: Law, Medicine, and theMarket (1999), Standard of Care: The Law of American Bioethics (l993), and Judging Medicine (1987), and a play entitled Shelley's Brain, that has been presented to bioethics audiences across the U.S. and in Australia. Professor Annas wrote a regular feature on "law and bioethics" for the Hastings Center Report from 1976 to 199l, and a regular feature on "Public Health and the Law" in the American Journal of Public Health from 1982 to 1992 and since 1991 has written a regular feature for the NewEngland Journal of Medicine (“Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights”).

He  is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Institute of Medicine, a member of the National Academies’ Human Rights Committee, and co-chair of the American Bar Association's Committee on Health Rights and Bioethics (Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section). He has also held a variety of government regulatory posts, including Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, Chair of the Massachusetts Health Facilities Appeals Board, and Chair of the Massachusetts Organ Transplant Task Force.

Kavita Srivatsava, one of India's leading activists will be joining us for an informal conversation on activism around hunger, peace and justice in India.  Kavita is Secretary of People's Union for Civil Liberties, that has been at the forefront of the struggle for civil, political and socio-economic justice in India.  She is the petitioner in the internationally renowned ‘Right to food’ litigation in the Supreme Court of India, one of the most impactful socio-economic litigations in India.  She has also played a prominent role in women's movements in Rajasthan and has worked on numerous cases of violence against women. 

In addition these core issues, Kavita has also worked on issues such as communal violence, landmines in the Indo-Pak border, election monitoring in Kashmir, supporting Dalits networks an on practically every major social issue in North India.  Come join us for an informal conversation on hunger, peace and justice with this versatile activist.

Time: 3 pm

Date: 12 Nov, 2013 (Tuesday)

Location: E008 Encina Hall (East)

Supported by:

Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

Center for South Asia

San Jose Peace and Justice Center

Abstract
Since the early years of her career working with children in some of the direst situations in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Susan Bissell, UNICEF’s Chief of Child Protection, has witnessed children being targeted for such exploitative practices as human trafficking, recruitment into armed forces, and child labor. Violations of the child’s right to protection take place in every country and are massive, under-recognized, and under-reported barriers to child survival and development, in addition to being human rights violations. Children subjected to violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect are at risk of death, poor physical and mental health, HIV/AIDS infection, educational problems, displacement, and vagrancy.

 Protecting children from violence, exploitation and abuse is an integral component of protecting their rights to survival, growth, and development. UNICEF advocates and supports the creation of a protective environment for children in partnership with governments, national and international partners including the private sector, and civil society.  Bissell guides UNICEF’s Child Protection program in 170 countries, working with government officials and other partners to shape child protection policies. During this discussion, she will provide an overview of her role at UNICEF and the work she does to help ensure that governments honor their commitments to strengthen child protection systems and protect children.

In 2009, Susan Bissell was appointed to her current position in New York, heading all of UNICEF’s Child Protection work.  She oversees a team of professionals guiding efforts for children affected by armed conflict, child protection systems strengthening to prevent and respond to all forms of violence against children, and a range of other matters.

Lina Khatib is the co-founding Head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, was a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Lina is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2013) published by the UNDP, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Syria Justice and Accountability Center. She is also a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010.

Paul Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.  He is Director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention and a core faculty of the Centers for Health Policy and Primary Care Outcomes Research, at Stanford University.

Dr. Wise received his A.B. degree summa cum laude and his M.D. degree from Cornell University, a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and did his pediatric training at the Children's Hospital in Boston.  His former positions include serving as the Director of Emergency and Primary Care Services at the Children's Hospital, Boston, Director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health at Harvard Medical School, and Special Assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General.  Prior to moving to Stanford University, Dr. Wise was Vice-Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities in the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the academic and research base of Partners in Health.

Rajaie Batniji is a resident physician in internal medicine at Stanford and a CDDRL affiliate. His research examines the selection of priority diseases and countries in global health, and he is interested in global health financing and the priority-setting process of international institutions. His work has also examined social determinants of health in the Middle East. At FSI, Dr. Batniji is co-investigator on Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects explaining U.S. global health financing and political causes of public health crisis.

Dr. Batniji received his doctorate in international relations (D.Phil) from Oxford University where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. He also earned a M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and M.A. and B.A. (with distinction) degrees in History from Stanford University. Dr. Batniji was previously based at Oxford's Global Economic Governance Program, and he has worked as a consultant to the World Health Organization.

Abstract:

How can we encourage illegal actors to seek assistance from the state? Lawbreakers are generally hesitant to engage with the state, out of fear of incurring sanctions for having violated the law. They hesitate to seek law enforcement help if they are victims of crimes. They also shy away from other state institutions that could provide them with assistance such as social and health services, or education. The paper addresses this question by evaluating whether an incentive can increase HIV/AIDS testing amongst lawbreakers, who responds, and why. It presents a randomized field experiment in which sex workers in Beijing, China were assigned an incentive for getting an HIV test.

Speaker Bio:

Margaret Boittin is a fellow at CDDRL. She is completing her PhD in Political Science at UC Berkeley, and her JD at Stanford. Her dissertation examines regulation in China, focused on state intervention in prostitution from the perspectives of health, policing, and business. Her work combines ethnographic methods, as well as field and survey experiments.

Abstract:
This discussion will focus on the potential utility of innovative technology to address the governance obstacles to the provision of critical public services.  Using the challenge of maternal and child mortality reduction as an illustrative example, this discussion will outline the role political forces and governance failures play in shaping the public infrastructure of service provision and opportunities for reform.  Of special focus will be the potential role of technology to create and address these opportunities.  While there are numerous efforts underway to use new technologies to enhance the breadth and efficiency of health services in low-income settings, this discussion will focus on how these technologies could be “liberating” by being designed and used to address the political determinants of inadequate public service commitments and capacity. 

Dr. Paul Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.  He is Director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention and a core faculty of the Centers for Health Policy and Primary Care Outcomes Research, at Stanford University.  Dr. Wise has served as Chair of the Steering Committee of the NIH Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health, a member of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health and Society and currently serves on the National Advisory Council of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, NIH.  Dr. Wise’s research focuses on U.S and international child health policy, particularly the provision of technical innovation in resource-poor areas of
the world. 

Using Legal Frameworks to Foster Social Change: A Panel Discussion with the Fall 2012 Social Entrepreneurs in Residence at Stanford

November 14, 2012 12:45pm - 2:00pm

Room 280A

The Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law and the Center on the Legal Profession invite you to a panel discussion with the three Fall 2012 Social Entrepreneurs in Residence at Stanford (SEERS), fellows who are visiting Stanford as part of the Program on Social Entrepreneurship at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

Mazibuko Jara, chair of South Africa's National Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Equality (NGCLE), as well as the founder and first chairperson of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which combines social mobilization and targeted litigation to protect the rights those living with HIV; Emily Arnold-Fernandez, founder of Asylum Access, an international organization dedicated to securing refugees' rights by integrating individualized legal assistance, community legal empowerment, policy advocacy, and strategic litigation; and Zainah Anwar, one of the founding members of Sisters in Islam (SIS), an NGO that works on women's rights in Islam based in Malaysia, will discuss their career paths and their experiences in using legal frameworks to effect social change.

Link for RSVP: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/law/forms/SEER.fb