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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.

A new United States Department of Defense directive concerning development of autonomous weapons systems is an inadequate response to the threats posed by removing human control from the use of force, the International Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Watch said in a report issued this week. Instead of creating adequate controls on the development of these weapons, the directive…

A team of Harvard Law students seeks justice for Roma exposed to lead poisoning under the U.N.’s watch Editors note: this article was originally published in Harvard Law Today and was written by Brett Milano. Last November, Harvard Law students with the school’s International Human Rights Clinic travelled to New York and Kosovo, under the direction of Clinical Instructor Beatrice Lindstrom,…

Aminta Ossom, J.D. ’09, is a Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law. Immediately prior to joining the Clinic in 2019, she served as a human rights officer at the United Nations, where she supported the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and the Special Rapporteurs of the Human Rights Council. During summer 2022, she took a professional development leave, returning to…

In the almost ten years since she graduated from Harvard Law School, human rights lawyer Maryum Jordan (A.B. ’10, J.D. ’14) has become a legal chameleon. From the lush banks of the Peruvian Amazon to the rugged shoreline of Alaska, Jordan has developed legal strategies to sue a massive mining company, documented human rights violations and provided evidence to the…

As the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) moves into its implementation phase, the proposal to create a victim assistance and environmental remediation trust fund has generated much discussion among states parties and other stakeholders. The TPNW trust fund could offer significant value to the implementation process as a mechanism that would bolster the humanitarian purpose of…

This week, Olivia Klein from the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs published a feature on IHRC’s return to in-semester international travel. Check out the spotlight on two clinical trips: one to Dublin for the signing of the Political Declaration on Strengthening the Protection of Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences arising from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated…