Innovative Human Rights Projects Selected for HRI Funding
The Human Rights Initiative (HRI) has awarded a new batch of grants to four teams of University of Minnesota researchers to support their work on some of the most pressing human rights issues.
The Human Rights Initiative is a joint effort of the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) and the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, which supports interdisciplinary engaged research and teaching in the human rights field. The HRI Research Fund receives recurring funds from the University of Minnesota’s Provost Office to support faculty-led interdisciplinary human rights research through grants of up to $50,000.
Transparency and Engagement in U.S. Immigration Court by Ensuring the Quality and Utility of Data Collected by Volunteer Observers is a project led by the Sociology Department’s Jack DeWaard and the Law School’s Linus Chan. Their research supports work done by the Human Rights Defender Project which recruits and trains volunteers to observe immigration court hearings. This project seeks to validate the data collected from the volunteer observers’ notes against external sources about immigration court trends, ensuring the data is accurate and robust. Researchers will also interview the volunteers and collect their responses to use as qualitative data, which will contribute to researchers’ eventual conclusions about trends across immigration court hearings and decisions.
The Observatory for Disappearances and Impunity in Mexico: Media Reporting and Human Rights Accountability asks how media reporting can advance a culture of accountability for human rights violations in Mexico. Led by Barbara Frey of the Institute for Global Studies this research looks at how Mexican media reporting on enforced disappearances may impact public engagement with human rights. Key activities will include training student researchers in data collection and analysis, creating a database of 5,000 press articles covering disappearances from six Mexican states and analyzing that coverage, interviewing journalists and other key informants. The database and findings will be publicly available for both scholars and policymakers.
Animating Children’s Views: Implementing the UNHCR’s Article 12 Using Innovative Survey Methods is led by Deborah Levison, Professor of Public Affairs and Frances Vavrus, Professor of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development. The project is predicated on the premise that children should be consulted on human rights issues that impact them, but they are frequently overlooked during research and policy discussions. This innovative project is developing a new survey methodology which addresses this gap by using simple animations to ask survey questions of children ages 12-17. The project is in its second year, and will build upon results gathered during their first phase of testing in Tanzania by testing the methodology in Brazil and Nepal. Ultimately, such a tool could be used by researchers to collect children’s views that could inform human rights policy decisions.
The Global Diffusion of Anti-Terrorism and Law and its Impact on Human Rights is a project headed by Jessica Stanton of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Her research looks at how new anti-terrorism laws around the world are affecting human rights. The project focuses specifically on the UN Security Council’s unanimous resolution passed in reaction to the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks; which urged countries to strengthen their anti-terrorism laws. Many of these new laws have been used by states to undermine domestic political opposition and threaten civil liberties and human rights. The full extent of the consequences for human rights are still being uncovered, and this project seeks to inform this conversation. The research will focus specifically on non-Western countries and strive to understand the impact that anti-terrorism law has had in these countries.
