Student Advocacy Projects

Over our more than twenty year history, the Human Rights Program has engaged our students and community in many important and impactful advocacy projects. These projects often grow out of work that students engage in as part of their courses or involvement with HRP. students regularly shape our programming with their ideas. Most recently, students created the Brewing Justice Coffee Hours, a bi-weekly, student-led human rights conversation. Subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Instagram for updates. Students also launched Human Writes, a student-led platform for human rights analysis and advocacy. 

Some student projects have resulted in social, political, or policy change. Two such projects are the Hmong Grave Desecration Project and Child Protection International. Read about these initiatives and more below. 

Human Writes: A Human Rights Blog

Human Writes is a student-led platform for human rights analysis and advocacy, supported by the Human Rights Program and organized by its Undergraduate Working Group. It is an outlet for the student body to express, address, and advocate for issues pertaining to human rights. Human Writes is dedicated to challenging injustice, uplifting the dignity of individuals, promoting inclusivity, and amplifying young and emerging voices within the human rights advocacy movement. Read more on the blog.

Undergraduate Activism

Students pursuing a B.A. in Global Studies can select a human rights concentration and take classes taught by human rights faculty members, like International Human Rights Law, Human Rights Internship, and more. Our Fraser Fellowships give students the opportunity to participate in a summer internship with local human rights organizations like Global Rights for Women and the Advocates for Human Rights. The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and Dean’s First-Year Research & Creative Scholars (DFRACS) fund human rights students to participate in faculty-mentored research. With the recent addition of the HRP Undergraduate Working Group, now, undergrads can be involved in advocacy and organizing, planning events, and ensuring that the voices of undergrads are included in decisions shaping the curriculum and programming of HRP.

Child Protection International

Child Protection International (CPI) began in response to one incident in a remote town of Southern Sudan. In October 2007, University of Minnesota graduate student Gabriel Kou Solomon learned that his two nieces were violently abducted by armed men during a cattle raid on their village. Students affiliated with the Human Rights Program joined together to advocate for the rescue of the two girls by launching the Save Yar Campaign. The campaign grew into an international non-governmental organization. 
CPI worked to end systematic child abduction and address its root causes. 
To learn more about the work of CPI visit our Child Protection International project page. 

Hmong Grave Desecration 

For over twenty years a Buddhist temple in Thailand, Wat Tham Krabok, hosted a makeshift refugee camp for Hmong people who had fled Laos and feared forced repatriation.  In the early 2000s the majority of these refugees were resettled in the United States

It is estimated that there were approximately 2,000 Hmong refugees buried on the grounds of Wat Tham Krabok and other private land adjacent to the monastery. In mid-October 2005, a number of organizations began exhuming the graves; a violation of the religious rights of the Hmong people. 

Former Program Director Frey, along with her undergraduate students, worked with the Hmong community to develop a plan for addressing this violation of religious rights. Students worked with the community to collect testimony from over 170 affected individuals and used this information to develop a campaign which included a variety of activities and actions which culminated in a site visit of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people. THe Special Rapporteur, Professor James Anaya, visited Minnesota on December 10, 2008, to hear testimony concerning the desecration of Hmong graves at Wat Tham Krabok in Saraburi, Thailand.

Visit our Hmong Grave Desecration page to learn more about this project and access the document archive.