Human Rights

Global conflicts intensify and new ones are seemingly erupting daily it causes one to look at the civilians, of the majority of which are women and children, who are caught in the crossfire’s.  Displacement and trauma from the daily terrors of conflict leave irrefutable scars on their victims, however the increasingly violent nature of many […]

Children are indisputably the most victimized by that of armed conflict as well as natural disasters, and the long-term impact which is has on their development is profound. It is that heavy impact that can often become a parent’s worst nightmare as they work to help their children recover from trauma. A child woken each […]

Just as many of the children of Japan were beginning to calm from the traumatic shock and fear from the 8.9 magnitude earthquake which hit Japan’s northern coast on March 11, 2011, which also generated a thirty-foot tsunami, a second quake has now left many even more traumatized. A 7.4magnitude earthquake struck last Thursday, April […]

By Carol Bohmer and Amy Shuman Political asylum is a gender neutral concept.  The law of asylum is based on the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, currently adopted by 147 countries, so the actual asylum law of receiving countries is quite similar.  The impact of this ostensibly gender neutral law is, however, far […]

Last month the RFK Center for Justice & Human Rights and the California International Law Center at UC Davis School of Law released a new report on the conflict in Sudan.  The report analyzes the key transitional justice issues that Darfuris will be faced with once the conflict and violence ends. On March 23, the […]

“There are more than 190 countries in the world, and virtually all of them enslave children, women and men within, or across, their borders.” * Last night I had the honor to attend a screening at Georgetown University in Washington DC of the film, Not My Life,  which is to be released in June 2011, […]

Tamara Tunie, plays Dr. Warner, the medical examiner on the hit show Law & Order: SVU (Special Victims Unit), and while the SVU team on TV investigates fictitious crimes of abuse, the dramatized cases give a window into the trauma and horror that faces many children across the country. While Dr. Warner may not be […]

I am a fiction reader, and it’s rare when a non-fiction story grabs me in the same way as a good novel. Well, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s The Dressmaker of Khair Khana is such a book. Lemon was an accomplished journalist, in business school in 2005, who was assigned to write a story on women entrepreneurs […]

On friday Richard Goldstone walked back his important and controversial 2009 Goldstone Report on potential war crimes resulting from the Israeli incursion into Gaza earlier that year in a Washington Post Op-Ed. He held that while Palestinian crimes were ‘of course’ intentional, he did not want to second guess difficult decisions made by Israeli commanders […]

It was supposed to be the final stage of a nearly decade long peace process. It was supposed to finally put to rest the civil war that tore the country apart in the 1990s. It was supposed to be the start to a new chapter in Cote d’Ivoire’s history, one not marked by geographic and […]

Today, Tuesday, April 5, 2011, is SAAM Day of Action (formerly A Day to End Sexual Violence.  Every year one day is designated as day for supporters to rally and take viable action to bring awareness too and prevent sexual assault.  The day was set for to nationally to create increased awareness on sexual violence […]

Has Shari’a Law gone too far, especially with children?, this was the question that I posed in November 2008 following the use of Shari’a law by the al-Shabaab rebel militia group in Somalia to stone to death a 13 year-old, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, for adultery after her father reported that she was raped by three […]