2006 Symposium Application
SYMPOSIUM APPLICATION: LAW STUDENTS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
A. Applicant Information
Law Students for Human Rights (LSHR) was established by ten students in the fall of 2002 and is now one of the largest and most active student groups at NYU School of Law, with one hundred active members. LSHR’s goals are to: 1) promote global human rights by drawing on the unique resources of the NYU School of Law community; 2) establish a forum for education, advocacy and direct service related to human rights; 3) build a community for future practitioners of human rights law; and 4) focus on strategic human rights issues to study and advance through speakers, movies, direct service and other activities. LSHR pursues these goals through education, advocacy, career and symposium committees.
LSHR works closely with the faculty at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) – specifically, Philip Aston, our faculty advisor and the Faculty Director; the Executive Director, Smita Narula; and the Research Director, Meg Satterthwaite. In addition, Mary Holland, a Research Scholar who worked at Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights before coming to NYU, has supervised LSHR research projects and provided training and advice.
Each year, LSHR centers its activities around an organizing principle. Throughout the year, the group hosts speakers on topics related to the theme, and student members work on related research and advocacy projects with NGOs. This year’s organizing principle is “Displaced Persons,” and the group has already hosted many events based on this broad theme, including, among others: Transnational Corporations and Human Rights Accountability, featuring Dan Stormer, lead counsel on Doe v Unocal; Inside the Cages: Guantanamo, featuring Captain James Yee and Gita Gutierrez of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Smoke and Mirrors: Columbia's Demobilization of Paramilitary Groups, featuring Maria McFarland; Darfur Still Burns, featuring Peter Takirambudde, director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch; Courage to Think: Displaced Intellectuals in the U.S., featuring speakers from Scholars at Risk; and Escalating Conflict in Nepal: New Developments and Potential Solutions to the Current Human Rights Crisis.
In addition, over 80 LSHR members are working on nearly a dozen research and advocacy projects, including research on Guantanamo Bay litigation for the Center for Constitutional Rights; on the effectiveness of FEMA services for those relocated to New York City from New Orleans for Katrina Legal Aid; and on the incorporation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women into domestic legal regimes for UNIFEM.
In 2003-2004, LSHR began a tradition of holding a spring symposium on a topic related to the year’s organizing principle. Previous symposia focused on “Bringing Human Rights Home: Promoting Accountability in the Corporate Arena” and “The Economic and Social Rights of Non-Citizens,” and brought dynamic groups of scholars and practitioners to the Law School to discuss emerging theoretical and practical issues in the area of human rights. We hope to build on last year’s success with this year’s proposed symposium, “Human Rights and Governmental Obligations in the Wake of Natural Disasters.”
Contact information:
Matt Schrumpf
Symposium Committee Chair
(541) 760-176
mhs302@nyu.edu
VH Mailbox 863
B. Summary of Proposed Symposium
(1) Information about the proposed symposium:
(a) The title of the symposium is Human Rights and Governmental Obligations in the Wake of Natural Disasters.
(b) We hope to hold the Symposium on Monday, February 27, 2006, in Greenberg Lounge, Vanderbilt Hall.
(c) Our faculty advisor is Professor Philip Alston.
(d) The total budget we are requesting is ______$4,980.25___.
(2) The following are the sources with whom we have checked to ensure that no other event on the same or a similar topic will take place on campus during this academic year:
• Meg Satterthwaite & Smita Narula, Center for Human Rights & Global Justice
• Shabnam Faruki, President, ILSA
• Rich Vagas, Symposium Editor, Journal of International Law and Politics
• Megan Bradley, Health Law Society
• Jason Washington, BALSA
• CoLR
C. Subject/Format/Speakers of Symposium
1)-4)
Recent and ongoing humanitarian catastrophes highlight the need for dialogue on the applicability of human rights principles to governments’ obligations in this context. An enormous amount of aid has been pledged to victims of the Iranian earthquake in Bam, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. One hopes that victims of the earthquake in Kashmir and the mudslides in Guatemala will not be neglected. Yet critics charge that much of the suffering that followed these natural disasters was preventable. Misery and death were exacerbated by a lack of preventative planning and construction, by inadequate evacuations, by bureaucratic inefficiency in distributing aid, by discrimination in aid delivery, and by “reconstruction” efforts that displace those left homeless even further. This Symposium seeks to bring these threads together and to clarify the terms of the debate by focusing on the human rights laws and norms that could guide governmental action and define governmental responsibility following natural disasters. To advance the argument on these contentious issues, we have selected a group of speakers ranging from local and national civil rights advocates, to scholars and international experts on internal displacement and refugee issues, to governmental aid administrators.
It is often assumed that responding to natural disasters is the province of the executive and legislative branches. . Given that disaster preparedness programs and aid distribution are matters of life and death, should we begin to think about the consequences of natural disasters in terms of States’ obligations to protect human rights? Months after the Indian Ocean tsunami, for instance, key issues remain unresolved, including land ownership, the allocation of reconstruction aid, and ground level re-employment assistance. While the protections afforded “civil and political” human rights are well-known, isn’t it time to ask whether governments should be legally responsible for providing humanitarian aid in ways consonant with economic, social, and cultural rights?
Our symposium’s first panel seeks to identify a legal and theoretical framework to address these issues. How, for instance, have the humanitarian norms associated with internally displaced people been implemented in natural disasters? How would U.S. ratification of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights influence the response to events such as Katrina? How can advocates push normative thinking based on these rights in a country that refuses to recognize them? Is there room for the application of these norms in domestic legal cases? What remedies might be available?
Humanitarian principles demand that individuals not be discriminated against. Following tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes, however, there has been ample evidence of discrimination based on race, class, caste, and status, from Dalits (“Untouchables”) in India to African-Americans in New Orleans. The second panel will look specifically at non-discrimination in regards to rescue efforts, access to aid, and reconstruction assistance. What are governments’ obligations and liabilities regarding such discrimination? What should they be? Should international financial institutions and non-governmental organizations have the responsibility not to acquiesce in the discriminatory provision of aid?
Finally, how can human rights advocates best respond to the man-made fallout from “natural” disasters? What might the effects be of lawsuits based on these rights and norms? How should “natural disaster jurisprudence” develop? Who are potential defendants and what would be the effect of suing them? Would granting economic, social, and cultural rights put the burden on the courts’ common law development techniques, taking years to become coherent and comprehensive? Or do advocates first need to take other steps, so as to change the legal climate in which there are so few actionable rights for natural disaster victims?
Schedule of the Day’s Events
9:00-9:25 - Continental breakfast and welcoming remarks.
9:25-9:30 - Introduction of Mary Howell
9:30-9:45 - Keynote Speaker: Mary Howell, Civil Rights Attorney
9:45-9:50 - Introduction to Theory Panel.
9:50-11:10 - Natural Disasters and Human Rights: How Do We Respond?
10:50-11:10 - Questions for panelists.
11:30-12:30 - Lunch Break.
12:30-12:35 - Introduction to Discrimination Panel.
12:35-1:55 - Race, Class, Caste, and Status: Discrimination in Disaster Relief.
1:55-2:15 - Questions for panelists.
2:15-2:25 - Break.
2:25-2:30 - Introduction to Accountability Panel.
2:30-3:50 - In Search of Accountability: Litigation and Alternative Remedies.
3:50-4:10 - Questions for panelists.
4:10-4:15 - Closing Remarks.
6)-9) The following are brief descriptions of the speakers, panels, and panelists.
Keynote Speaker
Mary Howell
Attorney, New Orleans (currently residing in New York)
Ms. Howell has undertaken police brutality cases and represented scores of clients in prison conditions suits, often at personal risk. She is a highly a visible spokesperson for the poor and minority communities of New Orleans. A longtime member of the National Lawyers Guild, she serves on the board of its Police Brutality Project and has been extremely active in challenging government misconduct and protecting human rights since the disaster. She is working closely with evacuees who were sent to a southern Baptist camp in southern Missouri and is heavily involved in all aspects of the future of New Orleans.
Panel One: Natural Disasters and Human Rights: How Do We Respond?
To provide a common starting point for the day’s discussion, this panel will first identify the norms related to Internally Displaced Persons, as outlined in the U.N. Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, and the legal rights articulated in the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The panel will then discuss practical examples of how these rights might apply in times of natural disaster, analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of taking a rights-based approach to disaster preparation and response and answering the following questions: How do IDP norms shape the range of policies a government can make for responding to disaster? For example, does a country ever have the obligation to accept international humanitarian relief? Why is humanitarian assistance during times of war treated differently from humanitarian assistance during times of natural disaster even though the IDP principles are equally applicable? How have government responses to the Indian Ocean tsunami and recent hurricanes applied or failed to apply the international norms and guidelines such as self-determination, freedom of movement, right to privacy, right to dignity, right to vote, respect for the deceased, right to know the whereabouts of missing kind, and the right to the rule of law? What can governments learn from one another’s responses?
Proposed Panelists (four of the following)
Philip Alston
Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
Professor Alston is an internationally-renowned expert on human rights law. He chaired the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights from 1990-1998, and has served as a consultant to the ILO, UNDP, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNESCO, OECD, and UNICEF. He has taught and published widely in the areas of international human rights and international institutions, and has a particular interest in the developing area of economic and social rights jurisprudence.
Cathy Albisa
Executive Director, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative
Cathy Albisa is an attorney specializing in the implementation of human rights standards in the United States. The National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) promotes a human rights vision for the United States that ensures dignity and access to the basic resources needed for human development and civic participation. Toward this end, NESRI works with organizers, policy advocates and legal organizations to incorporate a human rights perspective into their work and build human rights advocacy models tailored for the U.S. Specifically, NESRI provides human rights research and analysis supporting domestic campaigns, human rights training within the social justice community, support for community organizing in the use of the human rights system, and support for human rights networks. Cathy Albisa is the former director of the Human Rights in the US program at the Center for Economic and Social Rights. She was also the Associate Director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School, and co-directed the International Women's Human Rights Law Clinic at CUNY Law School.
Chandra Bhatnagar
ACLU Human Rights Project
Previously Staff Attorney, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund
Chandra Bhatnagar is a staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF). Mr. Bhatnagar directed the South Asian Workers’ Project for Human Rights (SAWPHR), a community based direct legal services project that combines litigation, community organizing, advocacy, education and outreach, and seeks to serve low wage workers from the South Asian diaspora. Employing a “human rights” perspective, the South Asian Workers’ Project for Human Rights combines responses to traditional “workers rights” issues such as unpaid wages and job safety, with a broader more holistic response to issues of racial profiling, police brutality, hate crimes, racial discrimination and immigration concerns. Currently, for his position at the ACLU Mr. Bhatnagar has been working locally in the Gulf States with a coalition of grass roots organizations as well as the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Right’s serving the needs of those displaced by Katrina.
Ajamu Baraka
Executive Director, U.S. Human Rights Network
Ajamu Baraka is Director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, a coalition of more than 170 organizations working on the full spectrum of human rights issues. Formed to promote U.S. adherence to universal human rights standards by building links between organizations as well as individuals across the nation, the Network strives towards building a human rights culture that puts those directly affected by human rights violations in a central leadership role. The Network also works to connect the U.S. human rights movement with the broader U.S. social justice movement and human rights movements around the world. Baraka recently authored the piece “Hold the United States Accountable: The Internationally Recognized Rights of the ‘Internally Displaced’” which endeavors to apply IDP norms to the post-Katrina situation.
Jane Bullock
Research Scientist and Adjunct Professor, George Washington University Institute of Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management
Partner of Bullock & Haddow LLC, a disaster management consulting firm
Former 22-year FEMA employee and FEMA Chief of Staff
During her 22-year career at FEMA, Bullock worked in nearly all of FEMA’s principal disaster programs and served as an Agency spokesperson representing FEMA on all the major networks. With George Haddow, she is the co-author of two textbooks, Introduction to Emergency Management and Introduction to Homeland Security. Or in the alternative, George Haddow, research scientist and adjunct professor at George Washington Univ.’s Inst. of Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management, former FEMA deputy chief of staff, Partner of disaster management consulting firm Bullock & Haddow LLC.
Roberta Cohen
Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies and Co-Director, The Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, Brookings Institution
Senior Adviser to the Representative of the U.N. Secretary General on Internally Displaced Persons.
Ms. Cohen’s previous positions include the 1998 Public Member, U.S. Delegation to U.N. Commission on Human Rights; Consultant to UNHCR and the World Bank; Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Senior Adviser to the Delegation to U.N., Parliamentary Human Rights Group (London); and Executive Director, International League for Human Rights (New York). She has written numerous books and articles on internally displaced persons in such various regions as South Asia, the Caucasus Afghanistan, Iraq, and South America on topics including not only governmental responses and obligations but also those of regional organizations and international community. Or alternatively, Erin Mooney, Deputy Director, Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement.
Walter Kälin
U.N. Representative on Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons
Professor of Constitutional and International Public Law, Faculty of Law of Bern, Switzerland
Mr. Kälin’s current duties make him unquestionably qualified to speak on the principles of Internally Displaced Persons. In addition, he has written extensively on the application of IDP principles to situations of man-made disaster and natural disaster. In March 2005, in his role as a U.N. Representative, he visited the Asian countries devastated by the Tsunami of December 2004. Furthermore, it was apparent that IDPs were not being protected from discrimination in aid provision, involuntary relocation, property issues, and many other violations of IDP principles. Mr. Kälin’s testimony on these concerns will underscore the need to examine the role IDP norms and principles play in domestic and international policy and legal regimes. Or, alternatively, Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Mr. Egeland has 25 years of active experience in humanitarian, human rights and peace work through the United Nations, the Norwegian Government, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and other non-governmental and academic institutions. Or Francis Deng, former U.N. Representative on Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons.
Harold Hongju Koh
Dean of Yale Law School
Harold Hongju Koh, , is one of the country's leading experts on international law, international human rights, national security law and international economic law. He has received more than twenty awards for his human rights work. Koh authored or co-edited "Different But Equal: The Human Rights of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities" (2003); "Transnational Business Problems" (2003); “Deliberative Democracy and Human Rights" (1999); the "Justice Harry Blackmun Supreme Court Oral History" (1995, release date 2004); "Transnational Legal Problems" (1984); and "The National Security Constitution" (1990), which won the American Political Science Association's award as best book on the American presidency. Some of his work has focused on “norm internalization” the process by which social norms are inculcated in the individual directly, as opposed to implementation through legal regimes.
Importance of out of town panelists:
Ajamu Baraka’s work is directly related to integrating international human rights norms into a domestic setting. His experience in that process will be directly applicable to the discussion of this panel.
Jane Bullock will balance the panel by bring a governmental perspective to the discussion. Her long career in FEMA has exposed her to all aspects of the agency’s work. Her disappointment in FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina stems from the fact that she knows first hand how much the agency is capable of under appropriate leadership. She represents the argument that through attentive planning and preparation, FEMA could incorporate IDP principles without requiring recourse to litigation or legislation.
Roberta Cohen and Walter Kälin are some of the world’s foremost experts on human rights and the internally displaced. Together and independently they have authored a significant portion of the IDP corpus of knowledge. The expertise of either of these individuals is invaluable to any discussion on the rights of the internally displaced.
Panel Two: Race, Class, Caste, and Status: Discrimination in Disaster Relief.
This panel will provide an examination of how race, class, caste, and status have played a role in the responses to disasters in both hemispheres. A common critique heard in the aftermath of recent disasters has been that aid is not being channeled according to need but along axes of discrimination, from those concerning Untouchables to those that disenfranchise African Americans. Panelists will discuss this critique in terms of disaster preparedness and evacuation planning, rescue efforts, and access to aid and reconstruction assistance. Panelists will answer the question of what non-discrimination obligations exist for governments, international organizations, and non-state actors in the context of natural disasters. Additionally, they will address land rights in this context, in particular the disturbing trend of post-tsunami “re”-construction that is further displacing the victims. Many people in Sri Lanka, India, and elsewhere have been prevented from rebuilding their homes and have seen their land granted to large privatized developments. Similarly, female heads of households have often been denied ownership of family property due to inheritance laws that don’t recognize women as lawful heirs.
Proposed Panelists (four of the following):
Smita Narula
Executive Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
International Human Rights Clinic Instructor, NYU School of Law
Smita Narula joined NYU School of Law in August 2003 as Executive Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Clinical Law for the International Human Rights Clinic. Prior to NYU, Narula spent six years at Human Rights Watch, first as the organization's India researcher and later as Senior Researcher for South Asia. In this capacity, she oversaw Human Rights Watch's work on India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. She has authored a variety of reports and articles on caste discrimination worldwide and the rise of religious nationalism in South Asia, including a book titled Broken People: Caste Violence Against India's 'Untouchables' for which she received the 1999 Human Rights Award from India's Dalit Liberation Education Trust.
Margaret L. Satterthwaite
Research Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, NYU School of Law
International Human Rights Clinic Instructor, NYU School of Law
Between 2002 and 2003, Meg was a human rights consultant for the United Nations, working with the human rights section of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). She has also designed and taught courses on gender, human rights, and humanitarian law at Columbia University and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Meg's research interests include gender and human rights, sexual orientation and human rights and the rights of migrants. She is currently conducting research on the uses of human rights law to empower women migrant workers.
Naomi Klein
Author and Journalist
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of the international best-seller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Translated into twenty-five languages, No Logo was called by the New York Times "a movement bible." No Logo focuses on international discrimination that comes in the form of sweatshop labor. Naomi Klein's articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The New Statesman, Newsweek International, the New York Times, the Village Voice and Ms. magazine. She writes an internationally syndicated column for The Globe and Mail in Canada and The Guardian in Britain. A collection of her work, titled Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in October 2002. For the past six years, Klein has traveled throughout North America, Asia, Latin America and Europe, tracking the rise of anticorporate activism. She is a frequent media commentator and university guest lecturer. Her contribution to this panel will relate to the post-tsunami reconstruction and the push of corporate textile industries to gain land, government support, and low wage workers. Recently, she published “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” in The Nation.
Sarah H Cleveland
Professor in Law, University of Texas School of Law (currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University Law School)
Professor Cleveland is uniquely qualified to discuss the human rights and other legal impacts of natural disaster preparation and response on migrant workers and other non-citizens residing in the southeastern United States region. Professor Cleveland is currently the Faculty Director of UT Law School’s Transnational Worker Rights Clinic; her teaching and scholarly interests include federal civil procedure, international human rights, international law in U.S. courts, and foreign affairs and the Constitution. After clerking for Justice Blackmun on the Supreme Court, Professor Cleveland worked with Florida Legal Services, conducting impact litigation on behalf of Caribbean sugar cane workers and other migrant workers in the southeastern United States. In 1999, she was appointed to the Erlenborn Commission by the Legal Services Corporation to review the provision of legal services to aliens in the United States. More recently, she has authored or co-authored amicus briefs in a variety of human rights cases, including authoring a law professor amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court in Benitez v. Mata, No. 03-7434 (2004), regarding the due process limits on indefinite detention of removable aliens, and co-authoring a brief to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in OC-18, Advisory Opinion on the Legal Status and Rights of Undocumented Workers (2003). She is a member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of International Economic Law and serves on the legal advisory committees of several human rights nonprofit organizations, including the Center for Justice and Accountability, the International Labor Rights Fund, and the Farmworker Justice Fund.
Gloria Browne-Marshall
Executive Director, The Law & Policy Group
Assistant Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Gloria Browne-Marshall’s scholarship focuses on Constitutional Law and Racial Justice/Civil Rights Law. She recently spoke in front of the local chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild in a panel on the destruction and reconstruction of New Orleans on the history of African-American rights in the United States from the first Africans arrived, through the relative freedoms of the Reconstruction period, to the current state of affairs and future prospects. She spoke in the context of the displacement of the largely African-American population of New Orleans and the nascent reconstruction of the city.
Pia Oberoi
Refugee Officer, Amnesty International
Pia Oberoi is an Amnesty International researcher on refugees. She has worked for Amnesty on the United Nation's Migrant Workers Convention, and is an expert on the refugee policies of South Asian states. Ms. Oberoi has written recently on the problem of discriminatory administration of relief after the Indian Ocean tsunami, focusing specifically on the problems faced by Burmese migrant workers in Thailand. She will bring an important comparative international perspective on the impact of race and status discrimination on government response to disaster, and the application of international legal norms to such cases.
Vanita Gupta
Attorney, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF)
Vanita Gupta, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a 2001 graduate of NYU School of Law, has extensive experience advocating for the civil and human rights of primarily African American prisoners in Texas and Louisiana. Recently, Ms. Gupta interviewed prisoners displaced by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. LDF and Human Rights Watch investigated allegations that prisoners had been abandoned at the Templeman prison facility during the hurricane, and that prisoners evacuated to the Jena prison facility experienced heavy abuse in the aftermath of the hurricane. The abuses documented by Ms. Gupta and other LDF and Human Rights Watch researchers resulted in a call for a Department of Justice investigation of the Jena prison facility. Alternative speakers: Jamie Fellner, Director, Human Rights Watch U.S. Program; Corinne Carey, Researcher, Human Rights Watch U.S. Program.
Importance of out of town panelists:
Pia Oberoi’s firsthand research in Asia following the tsunami will provide an important global perspective to the panel’s discussion. Additionally, she can speak specifically about how race and status have affected the disaster relief in tsunami damaged countries. Because human rights and internal displacement are global issues, it is indispensable to have the perspectives, experience, and advice from other parts of the world.
Vanita Gupta’s recent research on prisoners displaced by Hurricane Katrina will be the domestic balance of Ms. Oberoi’s Asian experience. Additionally, the prisoners’ experiences can be viewed not only as an issue of status, but also of race, as the vast majority of New Orleans’s prisoners are African-American.
Panel Three: The Feasibility of Accountability: Litigation and Alternative Remedies.
Like every decision, the choice to litigate has benefits and burdens. The obvious benefit is compensation of an individual for the harm he has endured. Litigation has its downsides, however; courts are perpetually concerned with “opening the floodgates” to unlimited liability and especially so in response to an event that harms a number of people. What is the appropriate role then, for litigation following a large scale disaster that affects millions of individuals? What types of claims can be brought? Against whom? What effects will these suits have ex post facto, ex ante, and on immediate situations? Idealistically, lawsuits would result in compensation for the victims, improvements in planning, preparation, and prevention, and can assist immediate concerns such as land grabbing and potential exposure to harmful chemical and biological conditions through the issuance of injunctions and court orders. On the other hand, what undesired effects may occur? Insurance companies will undoubtedly be defending hundreds of lawsuits on these issues. How will this affect future insurance rates and availability?
Finally, this panel will also address how IDP norms might be used in these resulting lawsuits. They will answer the questions of whether U.S. domestic law is amenable to the use of IDP norms and if there is an intersection of covenants and conventions that can be made to protect the interests of these individuals.
Proposed Panelists (four of the following):
Mark Geistfeld
Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Professor Geistfeld teaches Tort Law, ProductsLiability, and Insurance Law at NYU School of Law. His scholarship includes the marriage of law and economics, specifically in the context of tort litigation and liability insurance. His economics based perspective on liability will be highly relevant to a discussion of who should be held accountable for major disasters. He used this analysis when helping to write a brief for litigation following 9/11.
Michael Ignatieff
Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Professor Ignatieff recently authored a piece in the New York Times Magazine called The Broken Contract in which he examines the social contract that binds the government to protect and take care of its citizens. He appears regularly on television and radio and has author of numerous and wide-ranging works. His books include The Warrior's Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1998), an examination of modern warfare and its complex moral implications; Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000), which won the George Orwell Prize, a study of the NATO bombing of Kosovo; and Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001), an account of the successes, failures and prospects of advances in human rights. His most recent book on ethnic war and intervention, Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, was published in 2003 and his most recent book is The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004).
Kenneth Feinberg
Partner and Founder, The Feinberg Group, LLP
Former Special Master of the Federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund
Kenneth Feinberg is the managing partner and founder of The Feinberg Group, LLP. The Feinberg Group was founded in 1993 and is the foremost law firm in the United States specializing in the negotiated resolution of complex legal disputes. Mr. Feinberg is one of the nation's leading experts in mediation and alternative dispute resolution. He has been Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, University of Pennsylvania Law School, New York University School of Law, and University of Virginia School of Law. Mr. Feinberg will be able to speak on the topic of the efficacy of the alternative to litigation that was created by the Federal Government following 9/11 as well as his experience in the type of complex litigation that arises following large scale disasters.
Michael S. Greco
President of the American Bar Association
Partner in the Boston office of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham, LLP
Michael Greco is well qualified to speak about the propriety, limits, and effects of litigation as he has been a trial lawyer for more than 30 years as well as an arbitrator and mediator at both the state and national levels. Mr. Greco’s interest in public interest policy-making is also conducive to the discussion of alternatives to litigation. While previously serving as President of the Massachusetts Bar Association, he helped appoint the Commission on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children, whose report and recommendations led to enactment of new statutes protecting the legal rights of children. He also chaired the first-in-the-nation Massachusetts Legal Needs for the Poor Assessment and Plan for Action, and was co-founder and co-chair of Bar Leaders for Preservation of Legal Services for the Poor, a national grassroots organization that helped preserve the Legal Services Corporation in the 1980s.
Or, alternatively, Ken Suggs
President, Association of Trial Lawyers of America
Partner, Janet, Jenner & Suggs, LLC
Mr. Suggs actively volunteered his time and experience with Trial Lawyers Care, the largest pro-bono legal effort in American history, which was created to assist the families of 9/11 victims with free legal representation. His involvement in this organization, as well as his 30 years of experience as a trial lawyer makes Mr. Suggs a perfect candidate to speak on the topic of litigation responses to disasters.
Martha F. Davis
Associate Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law
Previously Professor Davis was the vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. She has written widely on women's rights, poverty and human rights. Her book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, received the Reginald Heber Smith Award for distinguished scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice, and was also honored by the American Bar Association in its annual Silver Gavel competition. Recently she wrote the article “Preparing for the Worst: Re-Envisioning Disaster Legal Relief in the Era of Homeland Security: Special Feature: The Legal Community's Response to 9/11” in which she examines the duplicability of the New York legal community’s response to the legal issues which arose from the 9/11 disaster.
Peter Walker
Director, Disaster Policy, at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva
Associate Professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University
Director, Alan Shawn Feinstein International Famine Center, Tufts University
Professor Walker has published several papers on disasters, humanitarian assistance, and the role of law and litigation in these situations, including “Victims of natural disaster and the right of humanitarian assistance: A practitioner’s view.” His research also covers the topic of humanitarian accountability.
Eleanor Acer
Director of Asylum, Human Rights First.
Eleanor Acer oversees a 1,000-member volunteer lawyer network, maintains the quality of legal service provision to asylum seekers from 88 countries, directs the program’s training component, and guides Human Rights First’s staff attorneys. She speaks and writes regularly on issues relating to U.S. asylum law and policy. She was also an associate at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart LLP handling federal litigation and before that at Lord Day & Lord, Barrett Smith. She has coordinated mentoring programs and has served on the International Human Rights Committee and Immigration Committee of the Association of the Bar of New York. The combination of her litigation experience and human rights focus qualifies her to speak on the question of litigation and alternatives following a natural disaster.
Out of town panelists’ importance:
Martha Davis’s recent article examines the possible role government funding of legal assistance could play in situations following a major disaster. Her research indicates that current legislation and regulations allow FEMA to fund private lawyers providing legal assistance to disaster victims but contain the limitation that funded lawyers may not counsel a client on the possibility of suing federal, state, or local governments. When set against the backdrop of IDP norms, this purported assistance by the government loses much of its luster. Professor Davis will provide an alternative plan that can arguably be reconciled with IDP norms.
Michael Greco’s and Ken Suggs’s long tenure both as trial lawyers and as association presidents will provide the experience litigator’s viewpoint in this discussion. The successes and failures in the courtroom of their various litigation tactics will be invaluable in a discussion of whom one might sue, why, and what the results would be.
Michael Ignatieff vast knowledge on human rights and his recent publication of the social contractarian approach are a critical aspect of the discussion of government accountability.
Peter Walker is in the unique position of being able to speak about both disaster prevention and preparation as well as disaster relief due to his positions at the Red Cross and the International Famine Center.
10) We anticipate that we will have approximately 75-150 people in attendance over the course of the day. We expect that our audience will be composed of J.D. and L.L.M. students and professors from NYU and other New York City law schools, as well as practitioners from outside the law school.
11) In order to publicize our symposium, we plan to:
1. Advertise in The Docket.
2. Send e-mail announcements through NYU’s student group listservs.
3. Advertise this event with the members of New York City Students for Human Rights, an umbrella organization formed last year for the respective student organizations at the various NYC law schools. Columbia Law, Fordham Law, Brooklyn Law, and Columbia’s SIPA have agreed to circulate this year’s symposium.
4. Send flyers providing information about the symposium to practitioners through a mailing list provided by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.
D. Projected Budget:
A. Transportation and Lodging
1. Tickets
Atlanta-New York r/t airfare: $253.00
Boston-New York r/t train fare: $170.00
Boston-New York r/t train fare: $170.00
Boston-New York r/t train fare: $170.00
Washington D.C.-New York r/t airfare: $143.00
Washington D.C.-New York r/t airfare: $143.00
Lubbock (Tulia), TX-New York r/t airfare: $438.00
2. Local Transportation
Out of town invitees (6) at $150 each: $900.00
Local invitees (9) at $25 each: $225.00
3. Lodging
Seven invitees for one night at $159.00 $1113.00
Subtotal, Transportation and Lodging: $3,725.00
B. Food Services
Meal: Coffee, Tea, and Decaf, Danishes, Muffins, Scones, and Croissants and fruit
Date: February 27, 2006
Time: 9:00-9:25 am
50 guests at $6.00 per guest: $300.00
1 waitstaff at $81.25 each: $ 81.25
Subtotal, Food Services: $531.25
C. Service and Equipment Charges
1. NYU Sound Technicians
Date: February 27, 2006
Time Needed: 8:00 am-4:30pm
8 hours at $31.00: $248.00
2. Security Guards
Note: We hope to hold the event in Vanderbilt Hall but have included this item in case the Vanderbilt space is unavailable.
Date: February 27, 2006
Time Needed: 8:30am-4:30pm
8 hours at $30.00: $240.00
3. Coat Check Attendant
Note: We hope to hold the event in Vanderbilt Hall but have included this item in case the Vanderbilt space is unavailable.
Date: February 27, 2006
Time Needed: 8:30am-4:30pm
8 hours at $23.00: $184.00
4. Room Charge
1 room at $15.00 $ 15.00
Subtotal, Service and Equipment: $687.00
D. Publicity/Promotion
1. Brochures/Flyers $ 0.00
We will use email flyers.
2. Postage
200 pieces x $0.155 $ 31.00
3. Photocopying: $100.00
Note: for programs.
4. Long Distance Calls: $ 50.00
Subtotal, Publicity: $281.00
GRAND TOTAL: $4,980.25
A. Applicant Information
Law Students for Human Rights (LSHR) was established by ten students in the fall of 2002 and is now one of the largest and most active student groups at NYU School of Law, with one hundred active members. LSHR’s goals are to: 1) promote global human rights by drawing on the unique resources of the NYU School of Law community; 2) establish a forum for education, advocacy and direct service related to human rights; 3) build a community for future practitioners of human rights law; and 4) focus on strategic human rights issues to study and advance through speakers, movies, direct service and other activities. LSHR pursues these goals through education, advocacy, career and symposium committees.
LSHR works closely with the faculty at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) – specifically, Philip Aston, our faculty advisor and the Faculty Director; the Executive Director, Smita Narula; and the Research Director, Meg Satterthwaite. In addition, Mary Holland, a Research Scholar who worked at Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights before coming to NYU, has supervised LSHR research projects and provided training and advice.
Each year, LSHR centers its activities around an organizing principle. Throughout the year, the group hosts speakers on topics related to the theme, and student members work on related research and advocacy projects with NGOs. This year’s organizing principle is “Displaced Persons,” and the group has already hosted many events based on this broad theme, including, among others: Transnational Corporations and Human Rights Accountability, featuring Dan Stormer, lead counsel on Doe v Unocal; Inside the Cages: Guantanamo, featuring Captain James Yee and Gita Gutierrez of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Smoke and Mirrors: Columbia's Demobilization of Paramilitary Groups, featuring Maria McFarland; Darfur Still Burns, featuring Peter Takirambudde, director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch; Courage to Think: Displaced Intellectuals in the U.S., featuring speakers from Scholars at Risk; and Escalating Conflict in Nepal: New Developments and Potential Solutions to the Current Human Rights Crisis.
In addition, over 80 LSHR members are working on nearly a dozen research and advocacy projects, including research on Guantanamo Bay litigation for the Center for Constitutional Rights; on the effectiveness of FEMA services for those relocated to New York City from New Orleans for Katrina Legal Aid; and on the incorporation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women into domestic legal regimes for UNIFEM.
In 2003-2004, LSHR began a tradition of holding a spring symposium on a topic related to the year’s organizing principle. Previous symposia focused on “Bringing Human Rights Home: Promoting Accountability in the Corporate Arena” and “The Economic and Social Rights of Non-Citizens,” and brought dynamic groups of scholars and practitioners to the Law School to discuss emerging theoretical and practical issues in the area of human rights. We hope to build on last year’s success with this year’s proposed symposium, “Human Rights and Governmental Obligations in the Wake of Natural Disasters.”
Contact information:
Matt Schrumpf
Symposium Committee Chair
(541) 760-176
mhs302@nyu.edu
VH Mailbox 863
B. Summary of Proposed Symposium
(1) Information about the proposed symposium:
(a) The title of the symposium is Human Rights and Governmental Obligations in the Wake of Natural Disasters.
(b) We hope to hold the Symposium on Monday, February 27, 2006, in Greenberg Lounge, Vanderbilt Hall.
(c) Our faculty advisor is Professor Philip Alston.
(d) The total budget we are requesting is ______$4,980.25___.
(2) The following are the sources with whom we have checked to ensure that no other event on the same or a similar topic will take place on campus during this academic year:
• Meg Satterthwaite & Smita Narula, Center for Human Rights & Global Justice
• Shabnam Faruki, President, ILSA
• Rich Vagas, Symposium Editor, Journal of International Law and Politics
• Megan Bradley, Health Law Society
• Jason Washington, BALSA
• CoLR
C. Subject/Format/Speakers of Symposium
1)-4)
Recent and ongoing humanitarian catastrophes highlight the need for dialogue on the applicability of human rights principles to governments’ obligations in this context. An enormous amount of aid has been pledged to victims of the Iranian earthquake in Bam, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. One hopes that victims of the earthquake in Kashmir and the mudslides in Guatemala will not be neglected. Yet critics charge that much of the suffering that followed these natural disasters was preventable. Misery and death were exacerbated by a lack of preventative planning and construction, by inadequate evacuations, by bureaucratic inefficiency in distributing aid, by discrimination in aid delivery, and by “reconstruction” efforts that displace those left homeless even further. This Symposium seeks to bring these threads together and to clarify the terms of the debate by focusing on the human rights laws and norms that could guide governmental action and define governmental responsibility following natural disasters. To advance the argument on these contentious issues, we have selected a group of speakers ranging from local and national civil rights advocates, to scholars and international experts on internal displacement and refugee issues, to governmental aid administrators.
It is often assumed that responding to natural disasters is the province of the executive and legislative branches. . Given that disaster preparedness programs and aid distribution are matters of life and death, should we begin to think about the consequences of natural disasters in terms of States’ obligations to protect human rights? Months after the Indian Ocean tsunami, for instance, key issues remain unresolved, including land ownership, the allocation of reconstruction aid, and ground level re-employment assistance. While the protections afforded “civil and political” human rights are well-known, isn’t it time to ask whether governments should be legally responsible for providing humanitarian aid in ways consonant with economic, social, and cultural rights?
Our symposium’s first panel seeks to identify a legal and theoretical framework to address these issues. How, for instance, have the humanitarian norms associated with internally displaced people been implemented in natural disasters? How would U.S. ratification of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights influence the response to events such as Katrina? How can advocates push normative thinking based on these rights in a country that refuses to recognize them? Is there room for the application of these norms in domestic legal cases? What remedies might be available?
Humanitarian principles demand that individuals not be discriminated against. Following tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes, however, there has been ample evidence of discrimination based on race, class, caste, and status, from Dalits (“Untouchables”) in India to African-Americans in New Orleans. The second panel will look specifically at non-discrimination in regards to rescue efforts, access to aid, and reconstruction assistance. What are governments’ obligations and liabilities regarding such discrimination? What should they be? Should international financial institutions and non-governmental organizations have the responsibility not to acquiesce in the discriminatory provision of aid?
Finally, how can human rights advocates best respond to the man-made fallout from “natural” disasters? What might the effects be of lawsuits based on these rights and norms? How should “natural disaster jurisprudence” develop? Who are potential defendants and what would be the effect of suing them? Would granting economic, social, and cultural rights put the burden on the courts’ common law development techniques, taking years to become coherent and comprehensive? Or do advocates first need to take other steps, so as to change the legal climate in which there are so few actionable rights for natural disaster victims?
Schedule of the Day’s Events
9:00-9:25 - Continental breakfast and welcoming remarks.
9:25-9:30 - Introduction of Mary Howell
9:30-9:45 - Keynote Speaker: Mary Howell, Civil Rights Attorney
9:45-9:50 - Introduction to Theory Panel.
9:50-11:10 - Natural Disasters and Human Rights: How Do We Respond?
10:50-11:10 - Questions for panelists.
11:30-12:30 - Lunch Break.
12:30-12:35 - Introduction to Discrimination Panel.
12:35-1:55 - Race, Class, Caste, and Status: Discrimination in Disaster Relief.
1:55-2:15 - Questions for panelists.
2:15-2:25 - Break.
2:25-2:30 - Introduction to Accountability Panel.
2:30-3:50 - In Search of Accountability: Litigation and Alternative Remedies.
3:50-4:10 - Questions for panelists.
4:10-4:15 - Closing Remarks.
6)-9) The following are brief descriptions of the speakers, panels, and panelists.
Keynote Speaker
Mary Howell
Attorney, New Orleans (currently residing in New York)
Ms. Howell has undertaken police brutality cases and represented scores of clients in prison conditions suits, often at personal risk. She is a highly a visible spokesperson for the poor and minority communities of New Orleans. A longtime member of the National Lawyers Guild, she serves on the board of its Police Brutality Project and has been extremely active in challenging government misconduct and protecting human rights since the disaster. She is working closely with evacuees who were sent to a southern Baptist camp in southern Missouri and is heavily involved in all aspects of the future of New Orleans.
Panel One: Natural Disasters and Human Rights: How Do We Respond?
To provide a common starting point for the day’s discussion, this panel will first identify the norms related to Internally Displaced Persons, as outlined in the U.N. Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, and the legal rights articulated in the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The panel will then discuss practical examples of how these rights might apply in times of natural disaster, analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of taking a rights-based approach to disaster preparation and response and answering the following questions: How do IDP norms shape the range of policies a government can make for responding to disaster? For example, does a country ever have the obligation to accept international humanitarian relief? Why is humanitarian assistance during times of war treated differently from humanitarian assistance during times of natural disaster even though the IDP principles are equally applicable? How have government responses to the Indian Ocean tsunami and recent hurricanes applied or failed to apply the international norms and guidelines such as self-determination, freedom of movement, right to privacy, right to dignity, right to vote, respect for the deceased, right to know the whereabouts of missing kind, and the right to the rule of law? What can governments learn from one another’s responses?
Proposed Panelists (four of the following)
Philip Alston
Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
Professor Alston is an internationally-renowned expert on human rights law. He chaired the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights from 1990-1998, and has served as a consultant to the ILO, UNDP, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNESCO, OECD, and UNICEF. He has taught and published widely in the areas of international human rights and international institutions, and has a particular interest in the developing area of economic and social rights jurisprudence.
Cathy Albisa
Executive Director, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative
Cathy Albisa is an attorney specializing in the implementation of human rights standards in the United States. The National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) promotes a human rights vision for the United States that ensures dignity and access to the basic resources needed for human development and civic participation. Toward this end, NESRI works with organizers, policy advocates and legal organizations to incorporate a human rights perspective into their work and build human rights advocacy models tailored for the U.S. Specifically, NESRI provides human rights research and analysis supporting domestic campaigns, human rights training within the social justice community, support for community organizing in the use of the human rights system, and support for human rights networks. Cathy Albisa is the former director of the Human Rights in the US program at the Center for Economic and Social Rights. She was also the Associate Director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School, and co-directed the International Women's Human Rights Law Clinic at CUNY Law School.
Chandra Bhatnagar
ACLU Human Rights Project
Previously Staff Attorney, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund
Chandra Bhatnagar is a staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF). Mr. Bhatnagar directed the South Asian Workers’ Project for Human Rights (SAWPHR), a community based direct legal services project that combines litigation, community organizing, advocacy, education and outreach, and seeks to serve low wage workers from the South Asian diaspora. Employing a “human rights” perspective, the South Asian Workers’ Project for Human Rights combines responses to traditional “workers rights” issues such as unpaid wages and job safety, with a broader more holistic response to issues of racial profiling, police brutality, hate crimes, racial discrimination and immigration concerns. Currently, for his position at the ACLU Mr. Bhatnagar has been working locally in the Gulf States with a coalition of grass roots organizations as well as the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Right’s serving the needs of those displaced by Katrina.
Ajamu Baraka
Executive Director, U.S. Human Rights Network
Ajamu Baraka is Director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, a coalition of more than 170 organizations working on the full spectrum of human rights issues. Formed to promote U.S. adherence to universal human rights standards by building links between organizations as well as individuals across the nation, the Network strives towards building a human rights culture that puts those directly affected by human rights violations in a central leadership role. The Network also works to connect the U.S. human rights movement with the broader U.S. social justice movement and human rights movements around the world. Baraka recently authored the piece “Hold the United States Accountable: The Internationally Recognized Rights of the ‘Internally Displaced’” which endeavors to apply IDP norms to the post-Katrina situation.
Jane Bullock
Research Scientist and Adjunct Professor, George Washington University Institute of Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management
Partner of Bullock & Haddow LLC, a disaster management consulting firm
Former 22-year FEMA employee and FEMA Chief of Staff
During her 22-year career at FEMA, Bullock worked in nearly all of FEMA’s principal disaster programs and served as an Agency spokesperson representing FEMA on all the major networks. With George Haddow, she is the co-author of two textbooks, Introduction to Emergency Management and Introduction to Homeland Security. Or in the alternative, George Haddow, research scientist and adjunct professor at George Washington Univ.’s Inst. of Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management, former FEMA deputy chief of staff, Partner of disaster management consulting firm Bullock & Haddow LLC.
Roberta Cohen
Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies and Co-Director, The Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, Brookings Institution
Senior Adviser to the Representative of the U.N. Secretary General on Internally Displaced Persons.
Ms. Cohen’s previous positions include the 1998 Public Member, U.S. Delegation to U.N. Commission on Human Rights; Consultant to UNHCR and the World Bank; Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Senior Adviser to the Delegation to U.N., Parliamentary Human Rights Group (London); and Executive Director, International League for Human Rights (New York). She has written numerous books and articles on internally displaced persons in such various regions as South Asia, the Caucasus Afghanistan, Iraq, and South America on topics including not only governmental responses and obligations but also those of regional organizations and international community. Or alternatively, Erin Mooney, Deputy Director, Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement.
Walter Kälin
U.N. Representative on Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons
Professor of Constitutional and International Public Law, Faculty of Law of Bern, Switzerland
Mr. Kälin’s current duties make him unquestionably qualified to speak on the principles of Internally Displaced Persons. In addition, he has written extensively on the application of IDP principles to situations of man-made disaster and natural disaster. In March 2005, in his role as a U.N. Representative, he visited the Asian countries devastated by the Tsunami of December 2004. Furthermore, it was apparent that IDPs were not being protected from discrimination in aid provision, involuntary relocation, property issues, and many other violations of IDP principles. Mr. Kälin’s testimony on these concerns will underscore the need to examine the role IDP norms and principles play in domestic and international policy and legal regimes. Or, alternatively, Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Mr. Egeland has 25 years of active experience in humanitarian, human rights and peace work through the United Nations, the Norwegian Government, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and other non-governmental and academic institutions. Or Francis Deng, former U.N. Representative on Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons.
Harold Hongju Koh
Dean of Yale Law School
Harold Hongju Koh, , is one of the country's leading experts on international law, international human rights, national security law and international economic law. He has received more than twenty awards for his human rights work. Koh authored or co-edited "Different But Equal: The Human Rights of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities" (2003); "Transnational Business Problems" (2003); “Deliberative Democracy and Human Rights" (1999); the "Justice Harry Blackmun Supreme Court Oral History" (1995, release date 2004); "Transnational Legal Problems" (1984); and "The National Security Constitution" (1990), which won the American Political Science Association's award as best book on the American presidency. Some of his work has focused on “norm internalization” the process by which social norms are inculcated in the individual directly, as opposed to implementation through legal regimes.
Importance of out of town panelists:
Ajamu Baraka’s work is directly related to integrating international human rights norms into a domestic setting. His experience in that process will be directly applicable to the discussion of this panel.
Jane Bullock will balance the panel by bring a governmental perspective to the discussion. Her long career in FEMA has exposed her to all aspects of the agency’s work. Her disappointment in FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina stems from the fact that she knows first hand how much the agency is capable of under appropriate leadership. She represents the argument that through attentive planning and preparation, FEMA could incorporate IDP principles without requiring recourse to litigation or legislation.
Roberta Cohen and Walter Kälin are some of the world’s foremost experts on human rights and the internally displaced. Together and independently they have authored a significant portion of the IDP corpus of knowledge. The expertise of either of these individuals is invaluable to any discussion on the rights of the internally displaced.
Panel Two: Race, Class, Caste, and Status: Discrimination in Disaster Relief.
This panel will provide an examination of how race, class, caste, and status have played a role in the responses to disasters in both hemispheres. A common critique heard in the aftermath of recent disasters has been that aid is not being channeled according to need but along axes of discrimination, from those concerning Untouchables to those that disenfranchise African Americans. Panelists will discuss this critique in terms of disaster preparedness and evacuation planning, rescue efforts, and access to aid and reconstruction assistance. Panelists will answer the question of what non-discrimination obligations exist for governments, international organizations, and non-state actors in the context of natural disasters. Additionally, they will address land rights in this context, in particular the disturbing trend of post-tsunami “re”-construction that is further displacing the victims. Many people in Sri Lanka, India, and elsewhere have been prevented from rebuilding their homes and have seen their land granted to large privatized developments. Similarly, female heads of households have often been denied ownership of family property due to inheritance laws that don’t recognize women as lawful heirs.
Proposed Panelists (four of the following):
Smita Narula
Executive Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
International Human Rights Clinic Instructor, NYU School of Law
Smita Narula joined NYU School of Law in August 2003 as Executive Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Clinical Law for the International Human Rights Clinic. Prior to NYU, Narula spent six years at Human Rights Watch, first as the organization's India researcher and later as Senior Researcher for South Asia. In this capacity, she oversaw Human Rights Watch's work on India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. She has authored a variety of reports and articles on caste discrimination worldwide and the rise of religious nationalism in South Asia, including a book titled Broken People: Caste Violence Against India's 'Untouchables' for which she received the 1999 Human Rights Award from India's Dalit Liberation Education Trust.
Margaret L. Satterthwaite
Research Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, NYU School of Law
International Human Rights Clinic Instructor, NYU School of Law
Between 2002 and 2003, Meg was a human rights consultant for the United Nations, working with the human rights section of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). She has also designed and taught courses on gender, human rights, and humanitarian law at Columbia University and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Meg's research interests include gender and human rights, sexual orientation and human rights and the rights of migrants. She is currently conducting research on the uses of human rights law to empower women migrant workers.
Naomi Klein
Author and Journalist
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of the international best-seller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Translated into twenty-five languages, No Logo was called by the New York Times "a movement bible." No Logo focuses on international discrimination that comes in the form of sweatshop labor. Naomi Klein's articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The New Statesman, Newsweek International, the New York Times, the Village Voice and Ms. magazine. She writes an internationally syndicated column for The Globe and Mail in Canada and The Guardian in Britain. A collection of her work, titled Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in October 2002. For the past six years, Klein has traveled throughout North America, Asia, Latin America and Europe, tracking the rise of anticorporate activism. She is a frequent media commentator and university guest lecturer. Her contribution to this panel will relate to the post-tsunami reconstruction and the push of corporate textile industries to gain land, government support, and low wage workers. Recently, she published “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” in The Nation.
Sarah H Cleveland
Professor in Law, University of Texas School of Law (currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University Law School)
Professor Cleveland is uniquely qualified to discuss the human rights and other legal impacts of natural disaster preparation and response on migrant workers and other non-citizens residing in the southeastern United States region. Professor Cleveland is currently the Faculty Director of UT Law School’s Transnational Worker Rights Clinic; her teaching and scholarly interests include federal civil procedure, international human rights, international law in U.S. courts, and foreign affairs and the Constitution. After clerking for Justice Blackmun on the Supreme Court, Professor Cleveland worked with Florida Legal Services, conducting impact litigation on behalf of Caribbean sugar cane workers and other migrant workers in the southeastern United States. In 1999, she was appointed to the Erlenborn Commission by the Legal Services Corporation to review the provision of legal services to aliens in the United States. More recently, she has authored or co-authored amicus briefs in a variety of human rights cases, including authoring a law professor amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court in Benitez v. Mata, No. 03-7434 (2004), regarding the due process limits on indefinite detention of removable aliens, and co-authoring a brief to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in OC-18, Advisory Opinion on the Legal Status and Rights of Undocumented Workers (2003). She is a member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of International Economic Law and serves on the legal advisory committees of several human rights nonprofit organizations, including the Center for Justice and Accountability, the International Labor Rights Fund, and the Farmworker Justice Fund.
Gloria Browne-Marshall
Executive Director, The Law & Policy Group
Assistant Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Gloria Browne-Marshall’s scholarship focuses on Constitutional Law and Racial Justice/Civil Rights Law. She recently spoke in front of the local chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild in a panel on the destruction and reconstruction of New Orleans on the history of African-American rights in the United States from the first Africans arrived, through the relative freedoms of the Reconstruction period, to the current state of affairs and future prospects. She spoke in the context of the displacement of the largely African-American population of New Orleans and the nascent reconstruction of the city.
Pia Oberoi
Refugee Officer, Amnesty International
Pia Oberoi is an Amnesty International researcher on refugees. She has worked for Amnesty on the United Nation's Migrant Workers Convention, and is an expert on the refugee policies of South Asian states. Ms. Oberoi has written recently on the problem of discriminatory administration of relief after the Indian Ocean tsunami, focusing specifically on the problems faced by Burmese migrant workers in Thailand. She will bring an important comparative international perspective on the impact of race and status discrimination on government response to disaster, and the application of international legal norms to such cases.
Vanita Gupta
Attorney, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF)
Vanita Gupta, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a 2001 graduate of NYU School of Law, has extensive experience advocating for the civil and human rights of primarily African American prisoners in Texas and Louisiana. Recently, Ms. Gupta interviewed prisoners displaced by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. LDF and Human Rights Watch investigated allegations that prisoners had been abandoned at the Templeman prison facility during the hurricane, and that prisoners evacuated to the Jena prison facility experienced heavy abuse in the aftermath of the hurricane. The abuses documented by Ms. Gupta and other LDF and Human Rights Watch researchers resulted in a call for a Department of Justice investigation of the Jena prison facility. Alternative speakers: Jamie Fellner, Director, Human Rights Watch U.S. Program; Corinne Carey, Researcher, Human Rights Watch U.S. Program.
Importance of out of town panelists:
Pia Oberoi’s firsthand research in Asia following the tsunami will provide an important global perspective to the panel’s discussion. Additionally, she can speak specifically about how race and status have affected the disaster relief in tsunami damaged countries. Because human rights and internal displacement are global issues, it is indispensable to have the perspectives, experience, and advice from other parts of the world.
Vanita Gupta’s recent research on prisoners displaced by Hurricane Katrina will be the domestic balance of Ms. Oberoi’s Asian experience. Additionally, the prisoners’ experiences can be viewed not only as an issue of status, but also of race, as the vast majority of New Orleans’s prisoners are African-American.
Panel Three: The Feasibility of Accountability: Litigation and Alternative Remedies.
Like every decision, the choice to litigate has benefits and burdens. The obvious benefit is compensation of an individual for the harm he has endured. Litigation has its downsides, however; courts are perpetually concerned with “opening the floodgates” to unlimited liability and especially so in response to an event that harms a number of people. What is the appropriate role then, for litigation following a large scale disaster that affects millions of individuals? What types of claims can be brought? Against whom? What effects will these suits have ex post facto, ex ante, and on immediate situations? Idealistically, lawsuits would result in compensation for the victims, improvements in planning, preparation, and prevention, and can assist immediate concerns such as land grabbing and potential exposure to harmful chemical and biological conditions through the issuance of injunctions and court orders. On the other hand, what undesired effects may occur? Insurance companies will undoubtedly be defending hundreds of lawsuits on these issues. How will this affect future insurance rates and availability?
Finally, this panel will also address how IDP norms might be used in these resulting lawsuits. They will answer the questions of whether U.S. domestic law is amenable to the use of IDP norms and if there is an intersection of covenants and conventions that can be made to protect the interests of these individuals.
Proposed Panelists (four of the following):
Mark Geistfeld
Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Professor Geistfeld teaches Tort Law, ProductsLiability, and Insurance Law at NYU School of Law. His scholarship includes the marriage of law and economics, specifically in the context of tort litigation and liability insurance. His economics based perspective on liability will be highly relevant to a discussion of who should be held accountable for major disasters. He used this analysis when helping to write a brief for litigation following 9/11.
Michael Ignatieff
Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Professor Ignatieff recently authored a piece in the New York Times Magazine called The Broken Contract in which he examines the social contract that binds the government to protect and take care of its citizens. He appears regularly on television and radio and has author of numerous and wide-ranging works. His books include The Warrior's Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1998), an examination of modern warfare and its complex moral implications; Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000), which won the George Orwell Prize, a study of the NATO bombing of Kosovo; and Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001), an account of the successes, failures and prospects of advances in human rights. His most recent book on ethnic war and intervention, Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, was published in 2003 and his most recent book is The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004).
Kenneth Feinberg
Partner and Founder, The Feinberg Group, LLP
Former Special Master of the Federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund
Kenneth Feinberg is the managing partner and founder of The Feinberg Group, LLP. The Feinberg Group was founded in 1993 and is the foremost law firm in the United States specializing in the negotiated resolution of complex legal disputes. Mr. Feinberg is one of the nation's leading experts in mediation and alternative dispute resolution. He has been Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, University of Pennsylvania Law School, New York University School of Law, and University of Virginia School of Law. Mr. Feinberg will be able to speak on the topic of the efficacy of the alternative to litigation that was created by the Federal Government following 9/11 as well as his experience in the type of complex litigation that arises following large scale disasters.
Michael S. Greco
President of the American Bar Association
Partner in the Boston office of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham, LLP
Michael Greco is well qualified to speak about the propriety, limits, and effects of litigation as he has been a trial lawyer for more than 30 years as well as an arbitrator and mediator at both the state and national levels. Mr. Greco’s interest in public interest policy-making is also conducive to the discussion of alternatives to litigation. While previously serving as President of the Massachusetts Bar Association, he helped appoint the Commission on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children, whose report and recommendations led to enactment of new statutes protecting the legal rights of children. He also chaired the first-in-the-nation Massachusetts Legal Needs for the Poor Assessment and Plan for Action, and was co-founder and co-chair of Bar Leaders for Preservation of Legal Services for the Poor, a national grassroots organization that helped preserve the Legal Services Corporation in the 1980s.
Or, alternatively, Ken Suggs
President, Association of Trial Lawyers of America
Partner, Janet, Jenner & Suggs, LLC
Mr. Suggs actively volunteered his time and experience with Trial Lawyers Care, the largest pro-bono legal effort in American history, which was created to assist the families of 9/11 victims with free legal representation. His involvement in this organization, as well as his 30 years of experience as a trial lawyer makes Mr. Suggs a perfect candidate to speak on the topic of litigation responses to disasters.
Martha F. Davis
Associate Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law
Previously Professor Davis was the vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. She has written widely on women's rights, poverty and human rights. Her book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, received the Reginald Heber Smith Award for distinguished scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice, and was also honored by the American Bar Association in its annual Silver Gavel competition. Recently she wrote the article “Preparing for the Worst: Re-Envisioning Disaster Legal Relief in the Era of Homeland Security: Special Feature: The Legal Community's Response to 9/11” in which she examines the duplicability of the New York legal community’s response to the legal issues which arose from the 9/11 disaster.
Peter Walker
Director, Disaster Policy, at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva
Associate Professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University
Director, Alan Shawn Feinstein International Famine Center, Tufts University
Professor Walker has published several papers on disasters, humanitarian assistance, and the role of law and litigation in these situations, including “Victims of natural disaster and the right of humanitarian assistance: A practitioner’s view.” His research also covers the topic of humanitarian accountability.
Eleanor Acer
Director of Asylum, Human Rights First.
Eleanor Acer oversees a 1,000-member volunteer lawyer network, maintains the quality of legal service provision to asylum seekers from 88 countries, directs the program’s training component, and guides Human Rights First’s staff attorneys. She speaks and writes regularly on issues relating to U.S. asylum law and policy. She was also an associate at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart LLP handling federal litigation and before that at Lord Day & Lord, Barrett Smith. She has coordinated mentoring programs and has served on the International Human Rights Committee and Immigration Committee of the Association of the Bar of New York. The combination of her litigation experience and human rights focus qualifies her to speak on the question of litigation and alternatives following a natural disaster.
Out of town panelists’ importance:
Martha Davis’s recent article examines the possible role government funding of legal assistance could play in situations following a major disaster. Her research indicates that current legislation and regulations allow FEMA to fund private lawyers providing legal assistance to disaster victims but contain the limitation that funded lawyers may not counsel a client on the possibility of suing federal, state, or local governments. When set against the backdrop of IDP norms, this purported assistance by the government loses much of its luster. Professor Davis will provide an alternative plan that can arguably be reconciled with IDP norms.
Michael Greco’s and Ken Suggs’s long tenure both as trial lawyers and as association presidents will provide the experience litigator’s viewpoint in this discussion. The successes and failures in the courtroom of their various litigation tactics will be invaluable in a discussion of whom one might sue, why, and what the results would be.
Michael Ignatieff vast knowledge on human rights and his recent publication of the social contractarian approach are a critical aspect of the discussion of government accountability.
Peter Walker is in the unique position of being able to speak about both disaster prevention and preparation as well as disaster relief due to his positions at the Red Cross and the International Famine Center.
10) We anticipate that we will have approximately 75-150 people in attendance over the course of the day. We expect that our audience will be composed of J.D. and L.L.M. students and professors from NYU and other New York City law schools, as well as practitioners from outside the law school.
11) In order to publicize our symposium, we plan to:
1. Advertise in The Docket.
2. Send e-mail announcements through NYU’s student group listservs.
3. Advertise this event with the members of New York City Students for Human Rights, an umbrella organization formed last year for the respective student organizations at the various NYC law schools. Columbia Law, Fordham Law, Brooklyn Law, and Columbia’s SIPA have agreed to circulate this year’s symposium.
4. Send flyers providing information about the symposium to practitioners through a mailing list provided by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.
D. Projected Budget:
A. Transportation and Lodging
1. Tickets
Atlanta-New York r/t airfare: $253.00
Boston-New York r/t train fare: $170.00
Boston-New York r/t train fare: $170.00
Boston-New York r/t train fare: $170.00
Washington D.C.-New York r/t airfare: $143.00
Washington D.C.-New York r/t airfare: $143.00
Lubbock (Tulia), TX-New York r/t airfare: $438.00
2. Local Transportation
Out of town invitees (6) at $150 each: $900.00
Local invitees (9) at $25 each: $225.00
3. Lodging
Seven invitees for one night at $159.00 $1113.00
Subtotal, Transportation and Lodging: $3,725.00
B. Food Services
Meal: Coffee, Tea, and Decaf, Danishes, Muffins, Scones, and Croissants and fruit
Date: February 27, 2006
Time: 9:00-9:25 am
50 guests at $6.00 per guest: $300.00
1 waitstaff at $81.25 each: $ 81.25
Subtotal, Food Services: $531.25
C. Service and Equipment Charges
1. NYU Sound Technicians
Date: February 27, 2006
Time Needed: 8:00 am-4:30pm
8 hours at $31.00: $248.00
2. Security Guards
Note: We hope to hold the event in Vanderbilt Hall but have included this item in case the Vanderbilt space is unavailable.
Date: February 27, 2006
Time Needed: 8:30am-4:30pm
8 hours at $30.00: $240.00
3. Coat Check Attendant
Note: We hope to hold the event in Vanderbilt Hall but have included this item in case the Vanderbilt space is unavailable.
Date: February 27, 2006
Time Needed: 8:30am-4:30pm
8 hours at $23.00: $184.00
4. Room Charge
1 room at $15.00 $ 15.00
Subtotal, Service and Equipment: $687.00
D. Publicity/Promotion
1. Brochures/Flyers $ 0.00
We will use email flyers.
2. Postage
200 pieces x $0.155 $ 31.00
3. Photocopying: $100.00
Note: for programs.
4. Long Distance Calls: $ 50.00
Subtotal, Publicity: $281.00
GRAND TOTAL: $4,980.25
posted by lshr at 9:08 AM
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