The Impact of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the Americas
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Diego García-Sayán was elected President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for the 2010-11 and reelected for the term 2012-2013. He was the first Peruvian to be elected President of the Court. He has served as a judge on the court since 2004. During his distinguished career, Judge García-Sayán has served as Minister of Justice of Perú, and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Perú and as a member of the Peruvian Congress. He founded the Andean Commission of Jurists and was the Chairperson of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Judge García-Sayán is a university professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and author of many publications on international law and human rights.
CISAC Conference Room
Honorable Judge Diego García-Sayán
President
Speaker
Inter-American Court of Human Rights
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Experts debate specific improvements to anti-trafficking measures
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The Program on Human Rights concluded its ninth and final installment of the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Speakers Series on March 13 with presentations with Dr. Mohammed Mattar, executive director of the Protection Project and professor at Johns Hopkins University and Professor Alison Brysk, chair of Global Governance, Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara.
Dr. Mattar noted that while effective anti-trafficking laws depend on law enforcement and survivor protection, the key intellectual and ethical rationale of such laws is the concept of the exploitation of vulnerable people in vulnerable circumstances. Dr. Mattar explained the legal distinction between “human trafficking” and “slavery,” emphasizing that the latter is based on twin ideas of human beings as commodities to be bought and sold, as well as the exercise of ownership of one person over another. “There is no doubt that human trafficking is a degrading and severe violation of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, but it is unnecessary to label human trafficking as slavery because to do so we would need to identify the exercise of powers attached to the right of ownership,” Mattar said.
Among the challenges for a more effective anti-trafficking effort, Dr. Mattar listed the need to hold corporations responsible for their acts, to provide access to justice that allows for victim compensation, the engagement of civil society, and criminal enforcement and accountability under existing national and international law.
Professor Brysk explained that globalization has produced pernicious side effects. The acceleration of migration, especially of women, increases the incidence of gender violence and the commodification of “disposable people.” All these factors enable the increase of human trafficking. Brysk observed that international recognition of trafficking as a form of contemporary slavery has been helpful in influencing policy change. “There is a slavery spectrum,” Brysk said. “We need to work to guarantee physical integrity of people, migration rights and children’s rights.”
She also noted that the focus on sex slavery has high costs because it is based on “protection and not empowerment,” and “rescue over rights.” The individualistic emphasis and sexual focus of anti-trafficking efforts fails to recognize many forms of exploitative globalized labor. Women and children are put in dangerous and debilitating non-sexual jobs. There are also many forms of sexual and gender violence in other forms of exploitative globalized labor, such as in sweatshops.
Together, the speakers in the final session of the Program on Human Rights speaker series made a strong plea for more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of human trafficking in the 21st century. Sustained research that accounts for contemporary conditions, they told the Stanford audience, is needed to give policy makers and legislators the information and tools they need to combat the alarming global acceleration of human trafficking.
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Institution-building in Hard Places: Challenges, Contexts, Pathways
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Abstract:
This talk draws on case study evidence from Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies to reflect on some current theories about building accountable government. The focus is on settings where geography, insecurity, and limited resources render conventional management strategies unworkable.
Speaker Bio:
Jennifer Widner is professor of politics and international affairs and director of the Mamdouha S.Bobst Center for Peace & Justice at Princeton University. She runs a research program on institution building and institutional reform called Innovations for Successful Societies, a joint initiative of the Bobst Center and the Woodrow Wilson School. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2004-5, she taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. Her current research focuses on the political economy of institutional reform, government accountability, and service delivery. She also remains interested in constitution writing, constitutional design, and fair dealing—topics of earlier research. She is author of Building the Rule of Law (W. W. Norton), a study of courts and law in Africa, and she has published articles on a variety of topics in Democratization, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Development Studies, The William & Mary Law Review, Daedalus, the American Journal of International Law, and other publications. She is completing work on a book about making government work in challenging settings, drawing on experiences in Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Jennifer Widner
Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School
Speaker
Princeton University
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The Commitment to Public Services in India
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Abstract:
There is a wide diversity in the provision of public services in India. In some states one can go for miles without seeing a functional school or public health centre, where roads are poorly maintained, and electricity has not yet been introduced. In other places, governments tend to function remarkably in extending basic public services to all, with tremendous consequences to human lives. In this talk, Vivek Srinivasen will explore why some parts of India have developed an impressive social commitment to such services unlike others. In this context, he will also discuss the remarkable changes in Bihar and other parts of North India in the recent years.
Speaker Bio:
Vivek Srinivasen joined the Liberation Technology Program as the manager in February 2011 after completing his Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prior to this, Srinivasen worked with campaigns on various socio-economic rights in India, including the right to food, education and the right to information. Based on these experiences he has written (and co-authored) extensively on issues surrounding the right to food, including Notes from the right to food campaign: people's movement for the right to food (2003), Rights based approach and human development: An introduction (2008), Gender and the right to food: A critical re-examination (2006), Food Policy and Social Movements: Reflections on the Right to Food Campaign in India (2007).
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Vivek Srinivasen
Program Manager
Speaker
Program on Liberation Technology, Stanford University
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The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law
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From Oxford University Press:
There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this narrative, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous--few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as Jenny Martinez shows in this novel interpretation of the roots of human rights law, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade. Originating in England in the late eighteenth century, abolitionism achieved remarkable success over the course of the nineteenth century. Martinez focuses in particular on the international admiralty courts, which tried the crews of captured slave ships. The courts, which were based in the Caribbean, West Africa, Cape Town, and Brazil, helped free at least 80,000 Africans from captured slavers between 1807 and 1871. Here then, buried in the dusty archives of admiralty courts, ships' logs, and the British foreign office, are the foundations of contemporary human rights law: international courts targeting states and non-state transnational actors while working on behalf the world's most persecuted peoples--captured West Africans bound for the slave plantations of the Americas. Fueled by a powerful thesis and novel evidence, Martinez's work will reshape the fields of human rights history and international human rights law.
Features
- Forces us to fundamentally rethink the origins of human rights activism
- Filled with fascinating stories of captured slave ship crews brought to trial across the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century
- Shows how the prosecution of the international slave trade was crucial to the development of modern international law
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Oxford University Press
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0195391624
"Presumed Guilty" and post-film discussion with the director
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Winner of the 2011 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, “Presumed Guilty” follows the story of two young lawyers and their struggle to free Toño Zúñiga, a young man from Mexico City wrongfully sentenced to 20 years in prison. Filmmakers Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete expose the injustices of the Mexican legal system.
After the film, join Professors Beatriz Magaloni and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar for a discussion about the Mexican justice system with director Roberto Hernández.
“The film puts Mexico’s secretive courts on full display for the first time.” – The New York Times
Light refreshments served.
CISAC Conference Room
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Host
Beatriz Magaloni
Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA
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magaloni@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.
She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.
Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.
Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.
Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.
She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
CV
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Magaloni_cv (12).pdf
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Roberto Hernández
Director, "Presumed Guilty"
Commentator
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Roth on Obama's human rights record
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On April 13, Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch discussed Obama's human rights record to an audience of over 125 students and faculty, marking Roth's first speaking engagement at Stanford University. This event was hosted by the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and was the final installment of the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series.
David Abernethy, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Stanford University, introduced Roth and provided a detailed overview of his professional background and the stunning growth and impact Human Rights Watch has witnessed since Roth took the helm in 1993. Under Roth's leadership and strategic direction, Human Rights Watch tripled in size, expanding its reach to over 90 countries worldwide.
"Human rights Watch does a remarkable job in combining carefully documented facts with advocacy for a better world, including naming and shaming egregious violators of universally accepted norms," said Abernethy, in emphasizing the courageous work Human Rights Watch pioneers on a global scale.
Abernethy noted that Human Rights Watch is a "is a north, south, east, west NGO, directed towards all points on the compass and operating from all those points, as a truly globalized institution."
At the outset of his comments, Roth framed President Obama's human rights record as a desire to abandon the principles of the George W. Bush administration and embrace an approach that is in stark contrast to the Bush years of unilateral diplomacy.
Obama has evolved -- it has been a journey from being not George Bush to being himself.
- Kenneth Roth
Since assuming office in 2009, Roth noted, "Obama has evolved -- it has been a journey from being not George Bush to being himself."
Roth highlighted the differences between both presidents, emphasizing the fact that, "most significantly in terms of contrast, Obama was going to lead by example," Roth said. "He was going to have a domestic policy that he and we could be proud of and that would persuade others just by virtue of what the US did itself."
In reflecting on the evolution of Obama's approach to human rights since assuming office, Roth saw Obama moving from rhetoric to practice. Roth cited a number of examples where the Obama administration delivered substantially on their commitment to defend these principles and others where they had fallen short.
In terms of multilateral promotion of human rights, Roth discussed how the Obama administration supported the efforts of the United Nation's Human Rights Council by successfully lobbying for the U.S. to become a member and helping to revive the Council into a more effective body in holding governments accountable.
According to Roth, "the Council has introduced tough resolutions on Libya, the Ivory Coast, Iran, and revived this tool and the ability of a group of a government's peers to condemn it."
Roth also mentioned how the Obama administration has been a key player in supporting the International Criminal Court (ICC) by voting in favor of referring Libya to the ICC, arresting the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army in the Congo, and exerting pressure on Sudan to surrender President Bashir.
These actions, Roth maintained, "strengthened a key international institution designed to stop the impunity that lies behind so many of the world's worst atrocities."
While, Roth thought Obama had certainly struck a much more modest tone on the world stage than Bush, he did stress that Obama had retained the option of humanitarian intervention and is not afraid to use military force when necessary, highlighting the recent examples of Libya and Cote d'Ivoire.
Roth believed that Obama's biggest shift was towards China's human rights record. In 2009, Obama was hesitant to exert pressure on the Chinese concerning their human rights practice, which proved to be an ineffective strategy in advancing US interests. Since the January 2011 China summit in Washington, Obama dramatically reasserted himself, calling on China to expand human rights protections and realized "human rights is not a dangerous topic."
In surveying the Obama administration's policy in the Middle East and North Africa, Roth judged it as "inconsistent" toward the recent pro-democracy movements where strategic concerns have sometimes outweighed more ideological ones.
In Egypt, Roth believed the administration took too long to take an active stand against Mubarak in support of the protesters, but eventually came around to prove they were "better late than never."
Similarly in Yemen, Roth described the administration as hesitant to initially oppose President Saleh because it jeopardized their relationship with an important counter-terrorism ally.
In Bahrain, Roth explained that the administration refuses to take an active stance and continues to discuss the possibility of reconciliation in light of the flagrant human rights abuses committed at the hands of the Bahraini regime. Roth claimed that Obama is acting in the best interest of the US's Saudi partners who are "terrified" at the prospect of a Shiite revolution in Bahrain.
Roth characterized the administration's position towards Israel as a "predictable disappointment," in that the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution classifying the settlements as a violation of international law and rejected the Goldstone report, refusing to recognize the positive aspects of this comprehensive investigation of the war in Gaza.
On domestic policies, Roth commended Obama's immediate effort to end the Bush policy of torture and shutter the CIA secret detention facilities, but was disappointed that Obama refused to prosecute the Bush torturers and investigate where the torture took place.
Roth described the issue of long-term detention without trial as a work in progress, believing that Obama's hesitation to release a core group of 48 prisoners in Guantanamo stemmed from his concerns about potential future acts of terrorism.
In closing, Roth was optimistic about Obama's evolution over the past two years, noting the great strides he has taken to actively implement his values in US human rights policy. However, he was cautious in highlighting the tensions that exist between US interests and human rights, claiming that Obama still has a ways to go in striking a better balance between the two.
This event was a rare opportunity for the CDDRL community to hear from a leading investigator and critic of human rights abuses, committed to reducing human suffering on a global scale.
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