We encourage all members of the UCLA Law community to monitor UCLA's coronavirus page and Bruins Safe Online for updates and resources.
In its annual symposium, the institute addresses the most pressing contemporary human rights concerns of our times – from race and migration to the environment and technology, matters which resonate with our location here in Los Angeles, and which are reshaping our world.
Save the date for the next Promise Institute Annual Symposium - February 26, 2022.
On February 26, 2021, UCLA Law's Promise Institute for Human Rights, the Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs, and the Corporate Accountability Lab hosted a symposium to address issues of corporate accountability, featuring leading lawyers, scholars and activists and a keynote from Michael Fakhri, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
The second day of the symposium on February 27, 2021, was co-sponsored by UCLA Law's Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs and the International and Comparative Law Program, and will discuss future legal challenges in digital privacy and data collection, the creation of space law and policy, and sanctions and human rights enforcement.
UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. Each panel is approved for 1.25 hours of general MCLE credit. An individual can receive a maximum of 3.75 hours of general MCLE credit.
Day 1: Current Challenges - Co-sponsored by the Promise Institute for Human Rights, Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs, and Corporate Accountability Lab
Opening Remarks from the Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs, Promise Institute for Human Rights and Corporate Accountability Lab, and keynote address by Michael Fakhri, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, with Aslı Ü. Bâli, UCLA School of Law as moderator - Video
Panel: Human Trafficking in the International Food Supply Chain - Video
This panel addressed the current legal environment around forced labor, trafficking, and slavery in the food supply chain. Food sectors including chocolate and seafood have been found to have endemic problems with slavery and trafficking. This panel addressed the current legal landscape and proposed technological and practical solutions to hold wealthy corporations accountable for what is happening in their supply chain.
This panel is approved for 1.25 hours of general MCLE credit.
Download the papers for this panel.
Panelists
Moderator
Concurrent Panels: Current Challenges
Day 2: Future Challenges - Co-sponsored by the Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs and the UCLA International and Comparative Law Program
Paper Workshops
Paper Workshop: AI, Data Privacy, & Future Technologies - Video
Participants
Moderator
Paper Workshop: The Corporation as a Global Superpower - Video
Participants
Moderator
Paper Workshop: Sanctions and Human Rights Enforcement - Video
Participants
Moderator
Concurrent Panels: Future Challenges
The Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 2020 Symposium issue (Volume 25, Issue 1) is available to read without a paywall. A physical copy may also be purchased and the issue is also available through HeinOnline.
New lawsuits and recent rulings are connecting human rights to the climate crisis in increasingly urgent ways. The Urgenda ruling in the Netherlands, the complaint filed by Greta Thunberg and others under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Philippines' Commission on Human Rights' finding against fossil-fuel companies exemplify recent cases that have captured the attention of the public, advocates, and legal scholars.
On February 28, 2020, UCLA's Promise Institute for Human Rights, Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs hosted a symposium at UCLA School of Law on Human Rights and the Climate Crisis. At the daylong event, leading lawyers, scholars, and activists examined the potential of rights-based arguments to halt and seek remedy for environmental harms, with a focus on climate change.
Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace and Amnesty International, and Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, General Coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, delivered keynote speeches.
Program
Welcome and Opening Keynote - Video
Panel One: Domestic Rights-Based litigation and Climate Change - Video
The last few years have seen a proliferation of imaginative legal strategies at the domestic level that have mobilized rights-based arguments to protect the environment and address climate change. Founding themselves on the human rights to life, health and privacy, as well as constitutional protections – in some cases of natural phenomena – and innovative intergenerational claims, these strategies have had unexpected success in some quarters. What principles are emerging from these various domestic cases, can they be translated across borders, and which offer the best potential to protect our environment and avert the climate crisis?
Moderator: Cara Horowitz, Co-Executive Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, UCLA School of Law
Panel Two: International Human Rights Mechanisms and Climate Change - Video
International human rights mechanisms are paying increasing attention to climate change and the environment. The UN Human Rights Council resolutions on human rights and climate change since 2008 and the creation of the position of UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment in 2012 are symptomatic of this at the global level; regional human rights bodies, notably in Europe and the Americas, have issued important recent judgments and recommendations in this area. What potential do international human rights mechanisms offer to prevent and mitigate climate change, and how can this best be realized?
Moderator: Tendayi Achiume, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law, UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance
Lunchtime Concurrent Workshops
Concurrent Workshop Panel 1-A: Domestic Rights-Based Litigation and Climate Change
Discussant: Daniel Jacobs, Clinical Associate Professor of Management, Loyola Marymount University
Concurrent Workshop Panel 1-B: Domestic Rights-Based litigation and Climate Change
Discussant: Sean Hecht, Co-Executive Director, Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Evan Frankel Professor of Policy and Practice and Co-Director, Environmental Law Clinic, UCLA School of Law
Concurrent Workshop Panel 2: International Human Rights Mechanisms and Climate Change
Discussant: Catherine Sweetser, Deputy Director, Promise Institute for Human Rights and Director, International Human Rights Clinic, UCLA School of Law
Concurrent Workshop Panel 3: International Criminal Law and Climate Change
Discussant: Máximo Langer, Professor of Law, Director of the UCLA Transnational Program on Criminal Justice and Faculty Director of the UCLA Criminal Justice Program, UCLA School of Law
Poetry Reading - Video
Karen McCarthy Woolf, Fulbright All Disciplines Scholar and Promise Institute Poet-in-Residence
Panel Three: International Criminal Law and Climate Change - Video
Faced with the climate crisis, the movement to create a new international crime of environmental destruction is gaining voice. What would such a crime look like? Is it necessary, or can existing international criminal law be mobilized, for example by classifying massive environmental damage as a crime against humanity? What are the legal and political obstacles to either approach? What opportunities do they offer and how realistic is it to look to international criminal law to prevent and mitigate climate change?
Moderator: Kate Mackintosh, Executive Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA School of Law
Closing Keynote - Video
March 8, 2019
Welcome and Introduction - Video
Panel One: Race, Political Equality and Human Rights - Video
The international human rights regime often falls short of its universal ambitions, and does so in racially discriminatory or racially unequal ways. This panel will apply TWAIL and CRT to illuminate the racialized implications of the history, evolutions, structure, and priorities of the international human rights regime, including the primacy accorded individual “civil and political rights”. Panelists will also consider political equality among peoples or sovereigns, by exploring how race, sovereignty and human rights interface. Drawing on TWAIL and CRT perspectives will enrich the panel’s engagements with the many meanings and valences of political equality among individuals and among sovereigns in a postcolonial age that remains marked by empire.
Moderator: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
First Concurrent Session
Concurrent Panel 1: Migration - Room 1347
Discussant: Hiroshi Motomura, Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Concurrent Panel 2: Migration - Room 1357
Discussant: Cecilia Menjivar, Dorothy L. Meier Chair and Professor of Sociology at UCLA
Concurrent Panel 3: Political Equality - Room 1420
Discussant: Kamari Clarke, Visiting Professor in Anthropology at UCLA, and Professor of Global and International Studies and Anthropology at Carleton University
Keynote
Panel Two: Race, Migration, Human Rights - Video
Today, migrants and refugees confront hostility across the world, at risk from explicit political projects of racialized or religious exclusion, and from institutional and governance regimes that have this very same effect. As nation-states, especially in the global north, consolidate regimes of migrant and refugee exclusion and control, the human rights frame stands as the ascendant counter to sovereignty discourse at the global and regional levels. Panelists will explore the human rights frame as both “problem” and “solution,” and consider the circumstances of refugees, involuntary displaced persons (including as a result of climatic conditions), and those who move on account of economic conditions.
Moderator: Tendayi Achiume, Assistant Professor, UCLA School of Law
Second Concurrent Session
Concurrent Panel 4: Political Equality - Room 1347
Discussant: Angela Riley, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Director of UCLA's Native Nations Law and Policy Center
Concurrent Panel 5: Socio-Economic Inequality - Room 1357
Discussant: Noah Zatz, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Concurrent Panel 6: Socio-Economic Inequality - Room 1430
Discussant: Peter Hudson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at UCLA
Concurrent Panel 7: Roundtable on Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality - Room 1420
Panel Three: Race, Socio-Economic Inequality, and Human Rights - Video
This panel seeks to interrogate legal protections for economic, social and cultural rights in the seven decades since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from a perspective that centers racial equality, and the rights of the Third and Fourth Worlds. Recent scholarship has asserted that human rights frameworks developed in ways that complement neoliberalism rather than attenuating the gaping inequalities it has produced. Using CRT and TWAIL approaches, panelists will query whether and to what extent the individual conception of rights at the heart of the human rights framework has been implicated in the promotion of free markets at the expense of social welfare.
Moderator: Hannah Appel, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
