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Fifteen years ago this week, Irish Ambassador Daithí Ó Ceallaigh brought down his gavel at a conference in Dublin, signaling the adoption of the Convention on Cluster Munitions. In the years since, 123 countries have joined the treaty, which has proven an effective tool to prevent and remediate the civilian suffering caused by these indiscriminate weapons.

In May, Susan Farbstein spoke at the Just Society Workshop hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York about where the human rights movement has been successful through collaboration and where it has fallen behind, including in advancing diversity and equity internally within human rights organizations. Below is a link CFR’s recording of the full panel.

In the Vienna Action Plan, adopted in 2022 at the first annual meeting of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), states parties resolved to establish reporting guidelines on victim assistance, environmental remediation, and international cooperation and assistance. By regularly reporting on national measures taken to implement their Article 6 and 7 obligations, states parties could significantly enhance…

Twenty years ago, on May 12, 2003, I crossed a US Navy-built bridge into southern Baghdad and a world most people knew only from TV coverage. The capital city had fallen about a month earlier to US forces, and I was part of a three-person Human Rights Watch team sent to document civilian casualties from the hostilities.

Editors note: this article was originally published in Harvard Law Today . The military offensive by the Burmese government against the Karen people in their country had been going on for years before Jason Gelbort ’13 got involved. His participation in a fact-finding mission with Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic changed the course of his career.

In March, clinicians Anna Crowe, Bea Lindstrom, and Aminta Ossom traveled to Charlottesville, VA to participate in the 2023 International Human Rights Clinicians’ Conference hosted by the University of Virginia.   Crowe and Lindstrom spoke on the panel, “Innovations in Clinical Human Rights Pedagogy and Practice” and shared experiences from IHRC. Lindstrom reflected on the pedagogic opportunities and challenges of structuring…

The Stop Killer Robots campaign’s recent global meeting in San José, Costa Rica, highlighted the campaign’s vision for a new international legal instrument on autonomous weapons systems, what it will take to get there, and how the campaign has progressed to reach this point. The Digital Dehumanization Conference, the campaign’s first global meeting since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, convened campaigners from around the world from February 20-22.

On February 28, 2023, the International Human Rights Clinic hosted a panel discussion on the impact of and emergency response to the recent earthquakes in northwest Syria. For more than a decade, armed conflict has devastated the civilian populations in the region. The February earthquakes have exacerbated the situation, retraumatizing and displacing some of Syria’s most vulnerable communities. Despite the…

This article was first published on Just Security. The push to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapons systems made significant progress last month when nearly every country in Latin America and the Caribbean endorsed a new communiqué calling for the “urgent negotiation” of a binding international treaty.