Inaugural Hrant Dink Fellow Hopes to Utilize Her Position at the HRP to Respond to Human Rights Crises

The Human Rights Program strives to provide our students with opportunities to put their human rights education to practice. Through internships, research opportunities, and fellowships, we have helped undergraduates learn more about the field of human rights and obtain hands-on experience inside and outside of the classroom. This fall, The Human Rights Program announced the Hrant Dink Fellowship, a new opportunity for undergraduate students to work with HRP Director, Dr. Carrie Booth Walling, in enhancing the Program’s ability to respond to mass atrocity crimes. 

Hrant Dink was an Armenian Turkish journalist known for advocating for Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in Turkey. After being arrested several times because of his political ideology, Dink founded a newspaper called Agos, which was focused on creating solidarity within the Turkish Armenian community and highlighting many of the issues this community faced. In 2002, Dink was sued for a speech he made discussing identity and citizenship, and he and the newspaper suffered attacks by right-wing extremists who sought to smear his reputation. Dink was eventually warned that the language he used in his newspaper to criticize the Turkish government could encourage violence against him. Soon after, he was assassinated outside of his office in Agos.

Today, Hrant Dink is known as a champion of journalistic freedom, having used his platform to call attention to government corruption and the ongoing discrimination towards Armenians. The Human Rights Program’s Hrant Dink Fellowship is named in his honor and is intended to promote teaching, research, and public programs on human rights and on the consequences of people’s inhumanity to other peoples – inhumanity that derives from deep ethnic, national, racial, gender, and religious differences that divide people. The Hrant Dink fellow will work with the Director of the HRP to respond to mass atrocity crimes through monitoring reports and early warning systems, directing program attention to urgent crises, and collaborating with the Director to coordinate appropriate responses. 

Now, the Human Rights Program is excited to introduce our inaugural Hrant Dink Fellow, Taylor Laube-Alvarez (CLA ‘25). Taylor is a sophomore in the College of Liberal Arts studying Political Science and Global Studies. Her academic interests include the intersection between human rights and foreign policy, particularly within the area of migration. More specifically, she noted how her identity as a Chilean-American has strengthened her focus around the pitfalls and inequalities that exist within the U.S.’s immigration system. This has grown her passion for assisting refugees and asylum seekers who are simultaneously the most vulnerable to human rights abuses and oftentimes, the most under-aided. Taylor hopes to learn more about mass atrocity crimes through the Hrant Dink Fellowship so that she may better understand their relationship to migration and foreign intervention. 

Taylor described her initial interest in human rights as stemming from her familial identity. “My younger brother has autism, so I’ve always been the protective big sister trying to advocate for him and his rights” she explained. “[Disability rights] remains to this day one of my big passion areas within human rights.” Taylor emphasized that broad, blanket responses to human rights violations can often overlook the different abilities and needs of a significant portion of the world’s population, making it essential that responses be formulated with a disability-inclusive lens in mind. She hopes that the experience she will gain throughout the fellowship in responding to mass atrocity crimes will help develop her understanding of the complex processes that go into formulating inclusive human rights responses.  

Citing past internships with the Wilson Center Africa Program and Senator Klobuchar’s Minnesota Office, Taylor described how much of her work thus far in the professional sector has focused on human rights responses from a political lens. She stated that her research with the Wilson Center gave her “invaluable insight into the role that both internal politics and multilateralism play in developing solutions and responses to human rights crises.” 

When thinking about why she applied for the Fellowship, Taylor talked about how she wishes to look at human rights from a more holistic standpoint. When assessing emerging and emergent human rights crises, the Hrant Dink Fellow will incorporate integrative response models that highlight these problems in various ways, such as organizing events and creating fact sheets or policy actions alongside the Director of the HRP. Additionally, Taylor expressed the importance of the role’s focus on mass atrocity crimes given the current global climate and various conflicts going on today.

Excited about the opportunity to hone in on her interests within the field of human rights, Taylor sees this as an opportunity to not only expand her knowledge of human rights but also her understanding of the HRP’s role at the University of Minnesota and beyond. 

We are excited to see the outcome of Taylor’s work with the HRP and can’t wait to have her with us this semester. Stay updated with our website and social media to see her contributions to the HRP.