Giovanna Garcia ’25 reflects on her work in the International Human Rights Clinic
I chose to attend law school because I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. I chose Harvard Law School for the International Human Rights Clinic.
I was drawn to this work for a variety of reasons. My parents, public school educators, instilled in me a deep-rooted sense of social justice and equity practically since birth. My family’s experiences as Cuban refugees, and the experiences of our majority immigrant community, sparked my interest in human rights work with a focus on migration and displacement. I became interested in transitional justice approaches for these groups during my 1L summer internship with a migrant rights organization in Lesvos, Greece, where I was made acutely aware of the universal lack of accountability for systemic human rights violations against displaced people.
So, it seemed serendipitous when I joined the International Human Rights Clinic in Spring of my 2L year and heard about a project seeking reparations for Roma people poisoned by lead in UN-managed displacement camps in Kosovo. The project has since become the highlight of my time in law school.
Following the Kosovo war, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) served as the interim government in Kosovo from 1999-2008. In 1999, a Roma neighborhood in Mitrovica in northern Kosovo was destroyed, and the people living in it displaced. UNMIK “temporarily” resettled these over 700 people into displacement camps known to be contaminated with lead. The resettled population was meant to be in those camps for 45-90 days. They ended up being there for years—some, for over a decade.
As a result, community members died and many suffer countless irreversible harms to their health and quality of life due to lead-poisoning. In 2016, a UN-established Human Rights Advisory Panel found UNMIK liable for violating the human rights of this community and recommended UNMIK pay the victims individual compensation. Instead, in 2017, the UN Secretary-General announced the creation of a Trust Fund aimed at community projects for “Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian communities” in Kosovo generally, rather than for the victims of lead-poisoning specifically. This generalized approach was not steeped in consultation with the affected community and its failure to specifically target victims runs counter to the widely enshrined “right to remedy” in international human rights law. Moreover, while the Trust Fund had a $4.5 million dollar goal, to be funded through voluntary contributions by UN Member States, it has only received a single $10,000 contribution. As a result, it is now 2025 and the victims have not received a dime for their harms. And their harms are very much ongoing.
Our clinical work has thus been aimed at encouraging a group of like-minded UN Member States to pressure the UN to change the Trust Fund’s terms of reference such that they are based on consultation with victims. Our second goal is for these states to subsequently commit to contributing to a revised reparations program.
In February of 2024, during my first semester with the Clinic, this advocacy work brought our team to New York City where we moderated a closed-door convening with different UN missions at the Swiss Mission to the UN. In that conversation, it became clear that in order for Member States to meaningfully commit to these goals, they would need a more concrete understanding of the current status of the community and victims’ views regarding reparations.
These inquiries ultimately framed our team’s work this fall, when we spent months preparing to travel to Kosovo to meet with victims and answer Member States’ questions. Through repeated conversations with various stakeholders, Roma activists in Kosovo, and leaders among the affected community, we committed to an interview process and diligently planned with partners on the ground. In November, our clinical team traveled to Kosovo to interview victims of lead-poisoning in the Roma Mahalla in Mitrovica, where most of the community has resettled. We gained invaluable insight into the harms they and their families continue to suffer because of the lead-poisoning, and the kinds of reparations that they prefer.
Our trip was also punctuated by various advocacy meetings with different stakeholders: UNMIK, Kosovar government officials, embassies in Pristina, and civil society organizations. We juggled the contrasts between these highly formal interactions with the lived realities of the victims we were interviewing, many of whom live in severe poverty and suffer ongoing trauma related to the conditions in the camps.
Our mandate in victim interviews was difficult—we were traveling to a community deeply marginalized in Kosovar society, understandably frustrated that they have received no justice for the horrific harms they have endured, and tired of retelling their stories to international actors who seemingly achieve nothing. We asked interviewees to recount these harms and relay to us—total strangers—how they are still suffering. In that process, our team had to balance gathering the information we needed to meaningfully convince the UN and its Member States that the community’s harms are still real and worthy of justice, while avoiding retraumatizing victims. Moreover, our questions were also aimed at gauging victims’ opinions about various possible reparations models, requiring us to manage avoiding expectation-raising (knowing very well our advocacy could fail) while exploring very complex theories of remedy and justice.
Despite these challenges, our conversations were incredibly fruitful. We gathered nearly all the information we needed to push the needle forward while providing community members a much-needed update on the work that has been ongoing internationally to fight for the reparations they are owed. Overwhelmingly, the people we spoke with were responsive to this information and very willing to share their stories and perspectives.
We left Kosovo having spoken to over 60 victims. In those interviews, it was clear that lead-poisoning continues to profoundly affect their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Victims expressed huge frustration and disillusionment with the UN for leaving them in dangerous conditions for years, and for refusing to meaningfully help them since. While the victims we met were rightfully angry and exhausted, they expressed that they still want justice. We left Kosovo with a mandate to keep pushing for reparations.
During the Winter Term, I am continuing to work in the Clinic. My current focus is conducting the necessary advocacy with Member States and new potential stakeholders to (hopefully) inch closer to tangible justice for the affected community. In that role, I can now carry with me the humbling opportunities I had to engage with the victims and the privilege it was to be welcomed in their homes and treated with kindness in the face of so much adversity.
My time in Kosovo, and my clinical experience more broadly, has reaffirmed my commitment to the practice of human rights law and the necessity of the field. As a member of this clinical team, I have had the enormous privilege to have such varied, dynamic experiences. I gained skills in stakeholder engagement, fact-finding, oral advocacy, writing for strategic audiences, and so much more. Beyond that, however, I gained invaluable mentorship from my supervisor, Bea Lindstrom, as well as community through my incredible and thoughtful teammates, and reinvigoration in the values that brought me to law school in the first place.