“Too Many Opportunities to List:” Human Rights at HLS
“We offer students funding and full support if they go to a place in the global south and they work on human rights issues.” That’s Tyler Giannini, telling me about the Human Rights Program at HLS, where he’s associate director. “That’s a guarantee, whether they go during their first or second summer,” he emphasized. “Students go to many, many different places, whether they work for a nonprofit or an institution like the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank. There are a wide range of opportunities: too many to list.”
Interested in preventing human rights abuses in Darfur? Forced labor in Burma? Unfortunately, the list goes on and on. But with Harvard’s unrelenting support, students travel the globe to study and take action against human rights abuses. And interest is growing.
“We have more students than ever before interested in the program,” says Giannini, when asked about the boom in human rights clinical studies. Students work in Sierra Leone, Darfur, Latin America; during one semester, students were split into groups to travel to Liberia, South Africa, or Lebanon. The program is reaching to meet the increasingly complex needs of those pursuing an education in human rights, now offering a brand new course on Human Rights and the Environment. “We are working to diversify the offerings within clinicals programs,” he says, “so that students can get the tools they need to be good human rights advocates.”
