Human Rights Center Redoubles Activity

Columbia’s Center for the Study of Human Rights is emerging from dormancy, and recent administrative changes suggest the beginning of a new chapter of activity and research.

“The CSHR was always there but never very much exposed in the Columbia community, something that is no longer the case,” said Bess Rothenberg, associate director of the Center.

CSHR, which was established in 1978 as a means of furthering the study of human rights at Columbia, is “changing rather dramatically,” according to Rothenberg. These changes include two new co-directors, Alice Miller and Elazar Barkan, in an administrative regime change that Rothenberg says “promises of further activity.”

Rothenberg said one of CSHR’s aims is to better integrate the study of human rights into various disciplines to create a larger framework of understanding. “One of the things we don’t realize is that human rights applies to many fields,” she said.

In keeping with this aim, CSHR is promoting human rights education at Columbia by providing resources to various schools, such as the School of International and Public Affairs.

“The atmosphere created by the programming sponsored by CSHR—the advocates program, the seminars and lectures, the research conferences—has definitely created a student interest that has been reflected in courses offered and research conducted in SIPA, the college, and elsewhere in the University,” former SIPA dean and current political science professor Lisa Anderson said.

Specifically, CSHR serves as the interlocutor between students and their academic programs. Human Rights concentrator Rosemary Almonte, CC ’09, said she has benefited from CSHR because it helped her structure her course of study.

“They more or less pointed me in the right direction in terms of what I should focus on, if I wanted to purse a career—academic or otherwise—in human rights, and they also help in disseminating news about related internships and educational opportunities,” Almonte said.

CSHR is also focusing on training young human rights activists by giving them the experience they require. It initiated the Human Rights Advocates Program, which was created to fulfill the capacity-building component of the Center’s mission. HRAP takes place during the fall semester and involves bringing 10 diverse activists to New York for four months and giving them the opportunity to train at Columbia in an intensive human rights program.

“We’ve had a tremendous number of really successful people in the program, and the basic idea is to have a broad geographic distribution when selecting activists.” Rothenberg said. Last year’s activists came from Mexico, Cambodia, Thailand, Pakistan, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, and the United States.

CSHR will continue to work as an interdisciplinary center between faculty members within and outside of Columbia’s gates by seeking to promote research, bringing various faculties together at Columbia, and reach out to other universities in developing countries to enable a better understanding of the causes, impacts, research, and promotion of human rights around the world.

“We are still a little weak in that area and it definitely needs more work,’ Rothenberg said.