Read the 2020-2021 GRH Hub Grad Fellow Blog Posts:
Global Human Rights Hub Fellows Blog Archives 2020-2021
By Aryanna Chutkan
Last month, the #EndSARS hashtag began trending on Twitter, gaining worldwide attention and bringing the conversation on police brutality to the global stage. While the hashtag and its corresponding domestic social movement have existed since 2017, public backlash to the brutality of Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) intensified following multiple assurances from the Nigerian government that SARS would be disbanded. Despite these assurances and multiple formal disbandments SARS has consistently been reformed, and remains notorious for its extreme brutality. SARS has faced criticism from Nigerians and from international watchdog groups like Amnesty International, but SARS has continued to act with impunity, committing rapes, acts of torture, and extrajudicial killings. Public outrage at SARS’s repeated instances of torture and murder came to a head when, following mass protests and mobilization in response to video footage showing a SARS officer shooting a young motorist, removing his body from his vehicle, and driving off in the motorist’s car, SARS officers opened fire on a protest at Lagos’s Lekki toll gate, killing 48 people.
By Camila Páez Bernal
Four years after the peace agreement was signed, Colombia still faces indiscriminate killings and a high degree of political violence. Colombia’s history is a story of controlling civil society through the use of terror and violence with the objective of maintaining the dominance of economic elites and the concentration of political power. The peace agreement of 2016 has not allowed an escape from an unending cycle of violence and power perpetuation rooted in colonization and modernization discourses. Political violence is becoming a daily occurrence in some areas of the country. Sadly, we face the risk of its normalization in the light of a government consciously ignoring evidence of its increase.
By Gabrielle Lout
Williams, a social justice practitioner, was speaking at the 2020 Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions Annual Meeting where he stressed the critical need to place equity, not just equality, at the center of how we approach the most complex social and environmental issues threatening our ocean and coastal communities. Without adequate attention to both equality and equity we face the possibility of initiatives that fail to create transformative change for the marginalized and/or vulnerable groups.
By Matthew Smoldt
In December of 2010, James Makowski, a U.S. citizen, plead guilty to the sale of heroin. The court sentenced Makowski to several months of rehabilitation at a so-called boot camp. Yet, Makowski was transferred to a maximum-security prison for two months. Why? The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had filed for his detention in July. Mr. Makowski had been unaware of the detainer against him. The DHS made its request as part of the Secure Communities program, which, since 2008, has been the federal government’s main program to identify and deport undocumented immigrants. The program relies on file-sharing between local law enforcement agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security. Local law enforcement shares the information of all arrestees with federal agencies. In turn, federal agencies check the data against their records.
By Namig Abbasov
Despite improvements in human rights around the world (Fariss 2014), state repression is still with us. In particular, gay rights face strong backlash across the world. A number of states have taken steps to reverse the improvements over gay rights. Why do states sometimes repress the rights of sexual minorities?
By Camila Páez Bernal
In the last decade, a feminist wave has dyed Latin-America in purple and green. The purple tide has been the rise of movements claiming more legal and governmental responses to violence affecting women in the region. In contrast, the green tide is the agglomeration of social movements and organizations demanding the legalization of abortion and the implementation of sexual and reproductive health education policies. The increase in civic society mobilization has made possible women's political participation and representation by impacting legislatures and courts. This context gives hope for the future. Yet, do all women in Latin America will benefit from these changes and increasing inclusion? Does the representation increasing and the execution of new policies will be equally accessible by women, despite their class, ethnic, geographical, and race differences? These are crucial questions to think about right now to successfully implement mechanisms that take into account the different Latin-American women’s experiences, resources, and contexts.
By Gabrielle Lout
In recent years, widespread human rights abuses and labor violations in global fisheries have been documented and publicized, bringing attention to unacceptable industry practices and a systemic disregard for human wellbeing. Appalling incidents involving modern day slavery, human trafficking, and exploitation of migrant labor continue to be reported. Receiving less attention yet occurring with impermissible frequency are the infringements on individuals’ right to decent work, women's rights, cultural identity, and food security.
By Matthew Smoldt
When the pandemic began, many countries closed their borders. While subsequent openings have varied, all closures bear an important similarity. They put into question states’ respect for migrants’ rights. Such rights are enshrined in various international and regional agreements. For the United States, relevant agreements include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees; and the articles of the original Geneva Convention. By ratifying these agreements, the United States, and other countries, agree to adhere by them. Thus, according to scholars of international law, such documents create obligations for their parties, especially during these unusual times. One of the most prominent principles is non-refoulement, that is, the prohibition against forced return to a dangerous or threatening circumstance. Though some confine the scope of non-refoulement to governmental persecution, it is not the only relevant principle. One can establish grounds for the dignified treatment of migrants with other legal precepts.
By Namig Abbasov
Several states took advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to repress sexual minorities. Some visual evidence showed the Ugandan police raiding a shelter established for LGBTQ+ people and beating its residents. The evidence also indicates that the residents inside the shelter were tied with rope and taken to a police station and arrested without legal assistance. The program director at the shelter articulated that state officials use stay-at-home measures as “opportunity to get rid of” LGBTQ+ people (Cited in Strudwick, 2020).
2020-2021 GRH Hub Grad Fellows:
Namig Abbasov is a PhD candidate (Political Science) in the School of Politics and Global Studies Department at Arizona State University. He holds MA in International Relations and Dialogue Studies from Keele University, United Kingdom and BA in European Studies from Qafqaz University, Azerbaijan. His research areas include political violence, state repression against sexual minorities, and climate change with a regional focus on the post-communist area, specifically the Caucasus. He currently works on a research question of why states repress sexual minorities even though these groups do not threaten state security.
Aryanna Chutkan is a Master’s student studying Political Science with a concentration in comparative politics. Their research focusses specifically on post-colonial statehood and legal systems, with a specific geographic focus in Africa and the Caribbean.
Gabby Lout is a doctoral student in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. She graduated with a B.S. in Marine and Conservation Biology from Seattle University and received a M.A. in Global Leadership and Sustainable Development from Hawaii Pacific University. In all of her work, she is interested in finding innovative solutions for the complex socio-ecological challenges our marine environment is facing to protect the people who depend on it most. Her current research, at the nexus of human rights and conservation, is focused on promoting social responsibility and decent work in the seafood sector in Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago
Camila PáezBernal is currently a Fulbright scholar and a Ph.D. student at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. She holds a double B.A. degree in anthropology and philosophy from Universidad Externado (Colombia), and an M.A. in cultural studies from Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). Her research interests are women’s political participation, and political violence in Latin America, with a critical and feminist perspective. She has developed research about peasant women’s political identity and participation in Colombia using ethnography, depth interviews, and focal groups. She has previous teaching experience at Universidad Externado de Colombia (courses: philosophical structuralism and post-structuralism, and anthropology with a positivism and empirical approach)
Matthew Smoldt is a doctoral student in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. His interests include migration, immigration policy, and international finance. His recent works concern the causes and consequences of migrants’ remittances.