Author: Branzell, Alex

Using International Human Rights to Counter Urban Displacement and Advance Rights in Cities

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Friday, March 4, 2022
12:30pm - 2:00pm
Virtual Event

About This Event:

In the second meeting of the Economic & Social Rights Group for Spring 2022, we welcome Jackie Smith, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Smith will discuss a new white paper, Pittsburgh’s Affordable Housing Crisis: Is Privatization the Solution?, which she wrote with colleagues involved in Pittsburgh’s Human Rights City Alliance. She will discuss how the project emerged from the work of a diverse alliance of human rights organizers and how it contributes to ongoing local and translocal movement-building to advance housing as a human right. It also demonstrates important roles for networks of university- and neighborhood-based activists to play in advancing human rights in cities and communities. The white paper is available to read here, courtesy of Smith and her colleagues.

Presenter:

Jackie Smith’s research focuses on how globalization impacts people and communities, and how social movements for the environment, health, and economic justice have advanced transformative struggles. She has documented long-term trends in transnational social movement organizations and coalitions, in addition to research on connections between global politics and activism in cities and communities. Smith is currently engaged in participatory research with Pittsburgh and with national human rights organizers and engaged in work to connect municipalities with United Nations human rights work.

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This event is virtual and will be hosted on Zoom. Click the link above to register to attend. The event will be recorded.

The Economic & Social Rights Group (ESRG) is an interdisciplinary monthly gathering of faculty and graduate students who meet to share ongoing research and to discuss current scholarship around economic and social rights. It is the central to the mission of the Research Program on Economic & Social Rights.

The Research Program on Economic & Social Rights brings more than a dozen UConn faculty together with over 30 affiliated scholars from across the United States and Canada. Together, we have generated numerous graduate and undergraduate courses, several edited volumes, multiple co-authored articles, and the National Science Foundation-funded Socio-Economic Rights Fulfillment Index (SERF Index).

Russia’s Crackdown on Religious Minorities, Journalists, & Human Rights Defenders

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Tuesday, March 8, 2022
12:00pm - 2:00pm
Virtual Event

About This Event:

Join us for a discussion on the escalating persecution of religious minorities, journalists, and human rights defenders currently under way in Russia. Over the past several years, Russian authorities have labeled Jehovah’s Witnesses as “extremist” organizations and used anti-extremism laws to launch a campaign of arrests, harassment, and intimidation. During this event, we’ll explore the history and current reality of this case of religious persecution and hear first-hand accounts from community members.

Dr. Zoe Knox of the University of Leicester will deliver the keynote address, followed by reflections from targeted members of the Russian Jehovah's Witness community. Glenn Mitoma, Director of Dodd Impact, will moderate.

Keynote Speaker:

Zoe Knox is Associate Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Leicester. Her research explores issues of religious tolerance and intolerance in the modern world, in Russia and beyond. Her publications include Russian Society and the Orthodox Church: Religion in Russia after Communism (Routledge, 2005); Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular World: From the 1870s to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Voices of the Voiceless: Religion, Communism, and the Keston Archive (Baylor University Press, 2019), co-edited with J. deGraffenried.

Panelists:

Dmitri Antsybor, Kirill Kravchenko, & Aleksandr Tsvetkov

Moderator:

Glenn Mitoma, Director of Dodd Impact

This event is virtual and will be hosted on Zoom. Click the link above to register to attend. This event may be recorded.

Business, Human Rights, & the Triple Planetary Crisis

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Thursday, March 10, 2022
12:00pm - 1:15pm
Virtual Event

About This Workshop:

The Business and Human Rights Workshop is dedicated to the development and discussion of works-in-progress and other non-published academic research. Read below for the abstract of Prof. Sara Seck's upcoming paper, the focus of this workshop. The full paper is available to view and download below in advance of the workshop.

According to the United Nations, the world is facing a triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature (biodiversity) loss, and pollution and waste, with the most egregious consequences felt by those least responsible. These crises are also intertwined: nature-based solutions are promoted as climate change solutions even as heat domes fuel forest fires; extraction of minerals for green energy solutions negatively impacts biodiversity and creates pollution and waste; and carbon major companies are also among the largest producers of plastic pollution. International human rights law is increasingly grappling with environmental rights and responsibilities, as evidenced by the work of special rapporteurs on the environment and on toxic substances, among others. This paper will consider how business and human rights instruments could help to guide solutions to triple planetary crisis that are attentive to the need to reduce overconsumption by the rich while supporting equity and resilience of those most vulnerable to planetary crisis.

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Presenter:

Prof. Sara Seck, Dalhousie University

Discussant:

Prof. Chiara Macchi, Wageningen University

This event will not be recorded.

This event is sponsored by the Business and Human Rights Initiative, a partnership founded by Dodd Human Rights Impact, the UConn School of Business, and the Human Rights Institute. 

Tracking Rights Fulfillment in the Human Rights Measurement Initiative

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Thursday, February 24, 2022
3:00pm - 4:30pm EST
Virtual Event

About This Event:

In this month’s workshop, we feature the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), co-founded by Susan Randolph, Emerita Professor of Economics at UConn.

HRMI is a global collaborative venture between human rights practitioners, researchers, academics, and other supporters to measure performance on 13 key human rights metrics internationally. In this workshop, the HRMI team will provide an overview of the methodology underpinning their innovative metrics, demonstrate the rights tracker (a key tool of their impact strategy), and highlight several new endeavors.

Presenters:

Anne-Marie Brook, Co-Founder and Vision & Strategy Lead (based at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Institute in New Zealand)

Annie Watson, Children's Rights Co-Lead (based at Middle Georgia State University)

Chad Clay, Co-Founder and Methodology Research and Design Lead (based at University of Georgia)

Elizabeth Kaletski, Children's Rights Co-Lead (based at Ithaca College)

Matt Rains, Civil and Political Rights Lead (based at University of Georgia)

Stephen Bagwell, Economic and Social Rights Team (based at University of Missouri-St. Louis)

Susan Randolph, Co-founder and Economic and Social Rights Lead (based in Connecticut and Oregon

This event is virtual and will be hosted on Zoom. Click the link above to register to attend. The workshop will be recorded.

This event is sponsored by the Human Rights Research and Data Hub (HuRRD) at the Human Rights Institute. The Hub seeks to advance human rights research at UConn by supporting faculty and student projects and providing students the opportunity to develop research and data analysis skills that will advance their careers after graduation.

Business & Human Rights in an Unequal World: A Genealogy

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Friday, February 24, 2023
2:00pm - 3:15pm
Online Event - Zoom

About This Workshop:

The Business and Human Rights Workshop is dedicated to the development and discussion of works-in-progress and other non-published academic research. Below find the abstract for a preview of the paper. 

Business & Human Rights in an Unequal World: A Genealogy provides the first monograph explaining the emergence of ‘Business and Human Rights’ as a juridical field. Drawing upon fifty years of United Nations archives, the book argues that the BHR field emerges following the culmination of attempts by scholars, civil servants and activists to radicalize states' responses to inequality in the international legal order by re-casting the corporation as a vehicle of social change. The book argues that the BHR field has flourished by giving rise to a legal sensibility it calls ‘embedded pragmatism’. While pragmatism retains some of the radical sentiments of past attempts at redressing inequality through regulating corporate conduct, it fixates jurists attention on the 'art of the possible'. This has the effect of maintaining the central dynamics of existing corporate processes and results in the BHR Field providing a response to human rights abuse that is short-term in its approach, crisis-responsive, and based upon a theory of change that is incremental. The book then proposes a new theory of embedded intersectionality and invites scholars in the field to re-think its parameters by attenuating to human rights abuse in a manner that is historically-situated, proactive, and responsive to change that is increasingly exponential.

Professor Kelsall will discuss the central argument of her work and draw upon case studies of exponential change to illustrate her new theory.

Presenter:

Prof. Michelle Kelsall,
SOAS University of London

Discussant:

Prof. Tara Van Ho,
University of Essex Law School

This workshop will be hosted on Zoom. Please register to receive the Zoom information and paper. The workshop will not be recorded.

This event is sponsored by the Business and Human Rights Initiative, a partnership of Dodd Human Rights Impact, the UConn School of Business, & Human Rights Institute. 

Human Rights, Multinational Enterprises, & Legitimacy

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Wednesday, March 1, 2023
12:00pm - 1:15pm
Online Event - Zoom

About This Workshop:

The Business and Human Rights Workshop is dedicated to the development and discussion of works-in-progress and other non-published academic research. Below find the abstract for a preview of the paper. 

This paper attempts to explain why, in similar contexts, multinational enterprises (MNEs) respond differently to human rights questions, and why external audiences appear to tolerate these differences. Our explanation focuses on the perceived legitimacy of MNE human rights actions. This approach recognizes that organizations are actors that make legitimacy assessments, rather than mere legitimacy objects. We conceptualize organizational human rights attitudes and reasons for action, and we show how the two interact. We relate the norms that are used in legitimacy judgments, and the way that they are interpreted in different contexts, to different MNE human rights attitudes. Our analysis yields new predictions of the factors that might lead MNEs to adopt active, passive, or non-engagement human rights attitudes.

Presenter:

Prof. Rita Mota,
ESADE Business School

Discussant:

Prof. Harry Van Buren,
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

This workshop will be hosted on Zoom. Please register to receive the Zoom information and paper. The workshop will not be recorded.

This event is sponsored by the Business and Human Rights Initiative, a partnership of Dodd Human Rights Impact, the UConn School of Business, & Human Rights Institute. 

Human Rights Film+ Series: Tacheles – The Heart Of The Matter

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Monday, March 28, 2022
3:30pm - 4:45pm
Virtual Film Discussion

Schedule:

Please watch the film before the discussion. A link to view the film will be sent to registrants in advance. Register to receive the link.

3:30pm - Discussion with filmmaker Jana Matthes, Sebastian Wogenstein (Center for Judaic Studies), and James Coltrain (Digital Media & Design).
Yaar Harell, the main protagonist of the film, will also join us. Moderated by Heather Elliott-Famularo (Digital Media & Design). 

This event has been rescheduled to March 28, 2022 from November 16, 2021.

About the Film:

The Human Rights Film+ Series presents Tacheles - The Heart of the Matter, written and directed by Jana Matthes & Andrea Schramm (Germany 2020).

Synopsis: In this moving documentary, we follow the story of Yaar, a young Israeli living in Berlin who is rebelling against his Jewish identity. He accuses his father of suffering from the Holocaust although he never experienced it firsthand. In order to face his own family history, Yaar decides to engage with the Holocaust in a new way: via a computer game. Together with his two German friends, he creates a 1940s Germany in which Jews can defend themselves and Nazis can act humanely. His father is shocked. “Tacheles – The Heart of the Matter” shows how the trauma of the survivors affects the third generation. By blurring the truth and switching the roles of victims and perpetrators - can anyone cope with their own history? Is reconciliation possible with a Computer Game?

Co-sponsors: Human Rights Institute, Dodd Impact, Digital Media and Design, Center for Judaic Studies & Contemporary Jewish Life

Resist or Embrace: Environmental Human Rights Advocacy at International Human Rights Organizations

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Friday, February 18, 2022
12:00pm - 1:30pm
Virtual Event

Presenter:

Bi Zhao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Whitworth University. She specializes in international relations and methodology, with a substantive focus on democratic legitimacy in global governance, non-state actors, and international environmental politics.

About this Event:

In the first of three Economic & Social Rights Group events planned for this spring, Dr. Bi Zhao will present her research entitled “Resist or embrace: environmental human rights advocacy at international human rights organizations."

-Prakash Kashwan & Shareen Hertel (ESRG Co-Directors)

This event is virtual and will be hosted on Zoom. Click the link above to register to attend. The event will be recorded.

The Economic & Social Rights Group (ESRG) is an interdisciplinary monthly gathering of faculty and graduate students who meet to share ongoing research and to discuss current scholarship around economic and social rights. It is the central to the mission of the Research Program on Economic & Social Rights.

The Research Program on Economic & Social Rights brings more than a dozen UConn faculty together with over 30 affiliated scholars from across the United States and Canada. Together, we have generated numerous graduate and undergraduate courses, several edited volumes, multiple co-authored articles, and the National Science Foundation-funded Socio-Economic Rights Fulfillment Index (SERF Index).

Model Contract Clauses for Human Rights

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Wednesday, February 9, 2022
12:30pm - 1:45pm
Virtual Event

About this Event:

A presentation and discussion of the American Bar Association’s Model Contract Clauses for Human Rights Project.

Presenters: Prof. Sarah Dadush, Rutgers Law School, Olivia Windham Stewart, & David Snyder, American University

Commentator: Prof. Erika George, University of Utah

 

Sarah Dadush is a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School. Her scholarship explores innovative legal mechanisms for improving the social and environmental performance of multinational corporations. She established and directs the Law School's Business & Human Rights Law Program and co-leads an ABA Business Law Section Working Group that has developed a comprehensive toolkit for upgrading international supply contracts to better protect workers’ human rights. Before joining the Rutgers faculty, Dadush served as Legal Counsel for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations based in Rome. Prior to that, she was a Fellow at NYU’s Institute for International Law and Justice and an Associate Attorney at the global law firm, Allen & Overy. She received her J.D. and LL.M. in International and Comparative Law from Duke University School of Law in 2004.

Olivia Windham Stewart is an independent business and human rights specialist based in the UK, and a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Business and Human Rights Law Program at the Center for Corporate Law and Governance, Rutgers Law School. As an independent specialist, Olivia has worked on a range of projects to increase corporate accountability and due diligence across sectors, including an OECD due diligence alignment assessment, a European Citizens’ Initiative for Living Wages, a range of multistakeholder initiatives in the garment and footwear industry and research, training and facilitation projects on labour rights and BHR issues for a number of organisations across sectors. Prior to working independently, Olivia was on the Labour Rights team at Laudes Foundation (formerly C&A Foundation) and at Impactt UK. She has worked extensively in production countries around the world, particularly in South and South East Asia and has been a contributing member of the Principled Purchasing Project to draft model contract clauses to protect human rights in international supply chains since March 2020. Olivia holds a MSc with Distinction from SOAS University, London.

David V. Snyder is professor of law and director of the Business Law Program at the American University Washington College of Law. His work is primarily in contracts and commercial law, including their international and comparative aspects. He has been a professor of law at Tulane and Indiana (Bloomington) and has been a regular visiting professor at the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) since 2012.  He has also been a visiting professor at Boston University and William and Mary. He is a graduate of Tulane Law School and Yale College and clerked on the Fifth Circuit.

Erika George is the Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law and directs the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. She teaches constitutional law, international human rights law, international environmental law, international business transactions, international trade and seminars on business and human rights, inequality, and corporate citizenship and sustainability. She was the Interim Director of the University's Tanner Center for Human Rights and the University's 2018-2019 Presidential Leadership Fellow. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and serves on the board of the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights. She earned her B.A. with honors from the University of Chicago and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as Articles Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. She also holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago. She is the author of Incorporating Rights: Strategies to Advance Corporate Accountability (Oxford University Press, 2021).

This event will not be recorded.

This event is sponsored by the Business and Human Rights Initiative, a partnership founded by Dodd Human Rights Impact, the UConn School of Business, and the Human Rights Institute.

Rights Beyond Words: Mapping Human Rights Scholar-Organization Partnerships

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Wednesday, February 16, 2022
2:00pm - 3:30pm
Virtual Event

Presenters:

Zehra Arat is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at UConn. She studies human rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights, as well as processes of democratization, globalization, and development.

Shareen Hertel is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at UConn, jointly appointed with the Human Rights Institute. Her research focuses on changes in transnational human rights advocacy, with a focus on labor and economic rights issues.

Overview:

For this February edition of the HRI Colloquium Series, we will consider NGO-Scholar Engagement, the topic of an upcoming paper from Zehra Arat & Shareen Hertel.

Abstract:

For a sneak preview of their talk, here is the abstract of their forthcoming work: "For many human rights scholars, human rights is more than intellectual curiosity; it is the motivation for their work. They try to use their research and expertise to improve human rights conditions and work with policy makers and advocacy groups. This paper explores the complexities of partnerships between scholars and human rights organizations and groups (HROGs). Focusing primarily on the experience of social science and humanities scholars with a range of HROGs, we identify areas of tension, as well as the political implications of such engagement. The paper thus marks a critical step toward developing a more formal typology of such relationships that can be used to further explore variation in human rights outcomes stemming from such collaboration."

This event is virtual and will be hosted on Zoom. Click the link above to register to attend. The Colloquium will be recorded.