The Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, together with Stanford Summer Session are proud to offer a special session on human rights June 25 - July 25, 2012. The new course entitled, New Global Human Rights presents the question of human rights from an interdisciplinary perspective, taking into account the 21st century context, which requires that both state and non-state actors are included in the movement for rights for all. The course will examine emerging trends in international human rights with an analysis of new categories of human rights victims, actors, and technologies. Other related courses will be offered to allow students to build a summer schedule that allows them to engage in the academic study of human rights in a truly transformative way.

Keynote speaker: Honorable Fatu Bensouda, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Richard Steinberg is Professor of Law at UCLA and the Director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project. In addition to his UCLA appointment, Professor Steinberg is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Department of Political Science.

Professor Steinberg has written over forty articles on international law.  His most recent books are Assessing the Legacy of the ICTY (forthcoming 2010, Martinus Nijhoff), International Institutions (co-edited, 2009, SAGE), International Law and International Relations (co-edited, 2007, Cambridge University Press), and The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Economics, Law, and Politics of the GATT/WTO (co-authored, 2006, Princeton University Press).

Helen Stacy is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and Director of the Program on Human Rights at CDDRL

As a scholar of international and comparative law, legal philosophy, and human rights, Helen Stacy has produced works analyzing the efficacy of regional courts in promoting human rights, differences in the legal systems of neighboring countries, and the impact of postmodernism on legal thinking. Her recent scholarship has focused on how international and regional human rights courts can improve human rights standards while also honoring social, cultural, and religious values.

Mr. William R. Pace has served as the Convenor of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court since its founding in 1995. He is the Executive Director of the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP) and is a co-founder and steering committee member of the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect. He has been engaged in international justice, rule of law, environmental law, and human rights for the past 30 years. He previously served as the Secretary-General of the Hague Appeal for Peace, the Director of the Center for the Development of International Law, and the Director of Section Relations of the Concerts for Human Rights Foundation at Amnesty International, among other positions. He is the President of the Board of the Center for United Nations Reform Education and an Advisory Board member of the One Earth Foundation, as well as the co-founder of the NGO Steering Committee for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and the NGO Working Group on the United Nations Security Council. He is the recipient of the William J. Butler Human Rights Medal from the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights and currently serves as an Ashoka Foundation Fellow. Mr. Pace has authored numerous articles and reports on international justice, international affairs and UN issues, multilateral treaty processes, and civil society participation in international decision-making.

Abstract
Ever since we started to organize ourselves socially, we have thought hard and long about how to ensure that we can develop checks on the power that we entrust to some in our organization, and how we can ensure that this power is not abused or misused in different ways. There are several different ways to accomplish this goal - from balancing power between different institutions to limiting it in time. One particularly effective and interesting way to accomplish this goal has always been transparency. If we as members of an organization, citizens in a state or just human beings gain insight into how power is used, and how decisions are made, we can review the exercise of power and act on what we find.

But designing transparency is hard, and requires careful thought. As in all institutional design, the end result needs to reflect the set of relationships in the society we live in, and it needs to change when our circumstances materially change as well. In this essay I will argue that we need to examine what it would mean to change from passive access as the goal of our transparency design to active disclosure, and what new institutional challenges that will present us with.

Nicklas Lundblad is senior policy counsel and head of public policy for Google in Mountain View where he leads a small team of policy experts in analyzing and advising on public policy. He has worked with tech policy since he wrote his first article on the politics of crypto in 1994. Prior to joining Google he was senior executive vice president of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and co-founded Swedishcurrent affairs magazine Neo.. He currently serves on the Swedish ICT-council, advising the Swedish ICT-minister, works as a member of Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt's reference group on Internet Freedom and has been a member of several corporate and organizational boards. Nicklas was recently elected member of the Royal Engineering Academy in Sweden and is an Eisenhower fellow. In 2009 he was recognized as ICT-person of the year by the two largest computer and business publications in Sweden. He holds a B.A. in philosophy, a L.LM and a PhD in applied information technology. He has served on the e-Europe Advisory Board advising then-ICT-commissioner Reding on i2010 as well as represented Google in the OECD, ICC and WTO.

Speaker Bio:

Greg Distelhorst is a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Political Science and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His dissertation addresses public accountability under authoritarian rule, focusing on official responsiveness and citizen activism in contemporary China. This work shows how citizens can marshal negative media coverage to discipline unelected officials, or "publicity-driven accountability." These findings result from two years of fieldwork in mainland China, including a survey experiment on tax and regulatory officials. A forthcoming second study measures the effects of citizen ethnic identity on government responsiveness in a national field experiment. His dissertation research has been funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Boren Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation. A second area of research is labor governance under globalization, where he has examined private initiatives to improve working conditions in the global garment, toy, and electronics supply chains.

For more on Greg's research, please visit:

http://web.mit.edu/polisci/people/gradstudents/greg-distelhorst.html

Abstract:

Political parties that represent old regime interests in moments of democratization are normally thought exclusively to play a "negative" role, blocking democracy and only conceding it when sufficiently challenged. Summarizing research for a book on the historical rise of democracy in Europe, this presentation will focus on British and German democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make the case that under certain conditions, old regime conservative parties play a decisive and counter-intuitive role that makes democratization more settled over the long run.

Speaker Bio:

Daniel Ziblatt is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has been named a Sage Publications Fellow for a project on "Conservative Political Parties and Democratization in Europe" and in 2012-2013 is on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

His research and teaching interests include democratization, state-building, development, comparative politics and comparative historical analysis, with a particular interest in Europe. He is the author of Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), the winner of three prizes from the American Political Science Association, including the 2007 Prize for the Best Book published on European Politics. He is co-editor of a 2010 special double issue of Comparative Political Studies entitled "The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies." Recent papers have appeared in American Poiltical Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and World Politics.  His most recent papers have received APSA's 2011 Mary Parker Follett Prize from the Politics and History Section of APSA, APSA's  2009 Luebbert Prize for the best paper published  in comparative politics, the 2008 Sage prize for best paper presented in comparative politics at the APSA meeting, and two  prizes in 2010 from the Comparative Democratization Section of APSA.  Ziblatt has been a DAAD Fellow in Berlin, an Alexander von Humboldt visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne and the University of Konstanz, Germany, and visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris in 2010. He is currently completing a new book entitled Conservative Political Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe, 1848-1950 (Cambridge University Press) that offers a new interpretation of the historical democratization of Europe.