Critical Issues in Human Rights

Module 1: Transnational Human Rights Litigation: The first section of the course will cover transnational litigation with a focus on United States courts. The first week will focus on international law in the federal courts generally and the Alien Tort Statute in particular, and cover recent Alien Tort Statue case law and how to look for sources of international law for the students in the course who are not already familiar with international law. The second week will focus on human trafficking law and corporate accountability in supply chains. The third week will focus on fora outside the federal courts including a day each on state court claims, trade actions, and actions in other national jurisdictions. Overall, students should gain a good sense of how to use international law in national litigation and how to represent clients who were injured abroad.

Module 2: Human Rights and the Protection of the Environment: The relationship between international human rights law and the protection of the environment is developing at unusual speed. At the global level, the establishment of a Special Rapporteur on human rights in the context of climate change by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021 was followed by the landmark declaration by the UN General Assembly in 2022 that there is a universal human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. This built on the 2017 Opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that the right to a healthy environment was an individual and autonomous right, and developments in national jurisdictions around the world recognizing the significance of human rights obligations to environmental responsibilities. At the same time in the related field of international criminal law, efforts to create a new international crime of ecocide have gained pace since a diverse panel of international lawyers proposed a definition in summer 2021 to be incorporated as the fifth crime in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In this three-week course, we will explore these and other recent legal developments, which appear to be accelerating in line with the climate crisis. We will examine the potential and limitations of international human rights law and international criminal law to protect the environment, with attention to the interrelationship between human health and well-being and that of the wider ecosystem.

Module 3: Representing States and Advancing Human Rights before International Fora: Arbitration, Interstate Litigation and the United Nations: This module will focus on the practice of international law and representation of sovereign States before international courts and tribunals. Drawing on the instructor’s experience as counsel for States in a wide range of international litigation and arbitration matters, the module will focus on ways to advance human rights through the practice of international law. Students will learn about the various types of international law disputes and the fora in which they are resolved, recent developments in international law jurisprudence, and the process of creating international law at the UN.